


chicory coffee

by deniigiq



Series: Into the Multiverse [22]
Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV), Deadpool (Movieverse), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Gwen (Comics), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Alien Invasion, Begrudging Alliances, Case Fic, Did I mention the aliens? Apologies there are aliens., False Identity, Gen, Identity Issues, Identity Reveal, Murderdock is the Grinch, Stranded, Team Dynamics, Team Red, but for family feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:13:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 38,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26858761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: “Pay attention,” Miles said. “This guy is trying to steal my identity, my home, and my life.”“Yeah, I heard you, bro,” Bitsy said. “And this other guy showed up out of nowhere, like, exactly Spidey’s size and talking with a weird old Queens accent. He tried to tell us that he was Spidey, which is nuts, because Spidey talks like Wade and Wade talks like a guy who heard gangsters on TV in the 40s and decided that he was going to stick with that for life.”“What’s Tats doing about it? Has he told you anything?” Miles asked hurriedly.“I believe that he’s decided to set the guy on fire,” Bitsy deadpanned.(Miles wakes up one morning to find that he, Miles Morales, and he, Spiderman, have been replaced. And it's not just him. He and the other Spiderpeople scramble to figure out who these imposters are and what they want before they're all phased out of their own lives.)
Relationships: J. Jonah Jameson & Peter B. Parker, Matt Murdock & Gwen Stacy, Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Miles Morales & Matt Murdock & Peter Parker & Wade Wilson, Peter Parker & Miles Morales & the Avengers, Spiderman & New York City
Series: Into the Multiverse [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1348219
Comments: 143
Kudos: 498





	1. game start

**Author's Note:**

> I call this Identity Shenanigans to the 4335 power.   
> I'll be updating the tags as I go 💖
> 
> It's gonna be a long one, friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pov ITSV Miles

There was a set of shoes by the door; they were red Jordans with black and white accents and scuff marks around the edges of the soles. A few darker marks had been scrubbed off of the uppers but had left shadows of themselves despite these efforts.

Miles knew the shoes well.

He was wearing an identical set down to the scuff marks.

By the shoe rack was backpack dropped sloppily down on the rug. It was similarly familiar, from its color to the spinning eye-shaped keychain of the Brooklyn Bridge hanging off its largest pocket’s zipper. On the front, it even had the remnants of one of the stickers that Miles had slapped over the duct tape holding the frontmost pocket together before realizing how spectacularly bad that idea was with his dad on the loose in the house.

That was his backpack.

Those were his shoes.

That was his voice talking to his mom in the other room.

He stepped back once. And then twice. Back towards the door. Back out onto the street.

Once he’d taken the last step down from the stairs, he took a deep breath and looked back up at the white trim of his home.

Then he ran back the way he’d come.

This was his universe. Miles was positive of that. He hadn’t bounced. He hadn’t jumped. He hadn’t opened any windows to any other verses in a while now, actually. He’d spent the night before last realizing that he hadn’t talked to Gwen or B or Peni for nearly two months. The only other Spidey he’d seen recently was Peter, and Peter was MIA. 

Miles had texted him, but he hadn’t heard anything back.

The Spidey Sense hummed, though. It told Miles that Peter was okay. He was close enough to this universe. He hadn’t left to another one.

He was probably just sleeping or floating or whatever it was he did in the In-Between.

That was about to change, unfortunately, because Miles needed answers.

When Peter was drifting in and out of the In-Between, he tended to do so at his childhood home instead of his apartment. His aunt, Miles suspected, was a little more forgiving of his new alien-esque behaviors than his wife. It made sense; Peter had already been mutated once in her house, and she’d adjusted to that well enough. Now, Peter purred and gazed almost without pupils into nothingness for hours on end, but really, what was that on top of his established preference for being upside-down and sneaking up on company?

May Parker had already survived the latter bullshit alongside Peter’s seeming endless toorent of adolescent trauma. She could take on anything. Miles was sure of it.

Queens was warm and the afternoon sun hit the Parkers’ front door in a way that made it look cartoonishly teal.

Miles knocked. Mrs. Parker called from a ways away that she was coming.

She opened the door and looked down at Miles with a quirked eyebrow.

“Did you forget something, hon?” she asked.

He stared up at her.

Things had suddenly become…hollow.

“No, ma’am,” he said almost without realizing he was doing it, “I just remembered where I left it.”

He didn’t wait for her response; he tore away from the door back towards the train station. He was sure she was frowning after him, but he didn’t check.

That hollowness in his chest had started to stretch its trailing fingers into the crannies of his lungs.

He didn’t catch a train; he waited and waited until two trains roared into the station from opposite directions. Bodies got onto them, bodies got off of them, and still Miles waited.

There was a lull as the last few passengers made their way up the station stairs, fanning themselves with sheaths of paper as they stepped up into the sunlight.

As soon as all he could see of them were their receding legs, Miles darted as fast as he could in the opposite direction. He went to the far wall of the station and checked around before hopping off the platform. He looked up at the tunnel before him, checked his six again, and headed in with breath catching every so slightly on each inhale.

Peter had shown him the tunnels. He’d taught him how to move through them and the sewers—or rather, he was teaching him.

They were tricky and twisty and dark--and disgusting if Miles was being honest. But Peter told him that it was necessary to know how to move through the city without the web.

“Sometimes,” he’d said with that ever-present smile of his, “Spiderman needs to join the Black Widow in being covert.”

It was important not to be noticeable all the time. It was also important to know how to disappear.

Miles had made a mental note of that.

The tunnels lead out to a few train stations which had been abandoned. Light from the grates laid over the mouths of their staircases filtered down and lit patches of their crumbling platforms. Peter had a few favorites among these places in Queens. He’d spent the time after his uncle had been killed finding them.

Miles had a few favorites now, too. His were obviously in Brooklyn and so they were a ways away, and Miles had to come up with a plan of action _now_. It would be getting dark soon and it was a Friday.

His parents expected him home on the weekends. He’d left his dorm already. The security guard had signed him out.

He needed to figure out what to do.

He needed to figure out whho this person talking to May Parker and his own mom was.

Where they had come from.

What they wanted from him.

He needed to _think_. 

They weren’t abandoned-- the tunnels and platforms, that is; they just looked that way.

They were secretly crawling with bodies, and not just those of rats and cockroaches.

Vigilantes used them. Assassins used them. People who Miles had stood before in the suit passed in and out of the tunnels, making deals, trading weapons, and fighting wars in the bowels of the city without any of the up-toppers’ knowledge. Miles had to flatten himself against one of the tunnel walls and do a quick change out of his school uniform before continuing on through the next area.

It was heavily trafficked. An information hub of sorts.

A kid would stand out to the people in that space. A spider, not so much. And Miles didn’t need to be impeded on his way now. He knew what he had to do.

He had to find DP.

DP didn’t hang with crowds. He dispersed them. At the moment, he was locked in some kind of feud with the Punisher and both he and the Punisher preferred rooftops to the undercity. Word of the last couple of weeks had it that the battles up that high had already been waged. The war had traveled downwards and the folks lower down were starting to take sides.

Matt, of course, sided with DP.

He despised the Punisher for some reason. Miles hadn’t asked why, and Peter hadn’t brought it up. But more than that, someone close to Matt, someone who was Daredevil’s equal in strength, power, and skill people were saying, now stood as his mirror image on the Punisher’s side of the fence.

Matt didn’t like that.

He’d stood his ground in plain view and had made his allegiance well known. Since then, others had started lining up.

Jessica Jones stood with DP. The immortal Iron Fist stood with Castle.

Luke Cage stood with DP. A huge man known as ‘Cable’ stood with Castle.

Matt had warned Miles to stay the fuck away from the conflict. Things were getting bloody and nasty. They were turning into a war of loyalties and everyone, everywhere, was feeling betrayed and furious about it. It was no place for a kid.

But Miles didn’t know where else to go and something was majorly wrong. He’d learned in the last few months that safety wasn’t in numbers; safety was in who you knew and whether or not those bodies were living.

DP was prowling the tunnels in the South Bronx. Miles needed to surface just long enough to catch a train there.

He swapped clothes again before surfacing at the Elmhurst station. He caught the F train into the city and put his hood up when he got on the 4 north to the Bronx. As soon as his feet left car for platform, he set himself back to waiting, waiting, waiting.

Hunting, really, for an opening. For the backs of bodies in the crowd to be facing him. For people to be looking at their phones.

He waited and waited.

It was getting dark fast outside. That meant it would be easier to get back home when he was done getting questions answered. If, he realized with a sinking gut, he _could_ go home.

No, he told himself.

One problem at a time.

DP was underground. Miles saw his shadow first; it reached across the empty platform towards the point where it dropped off into nothingness and then tracks. He was sitting on a bench with a rifle settled between his knees like a guitar. His palms laid open on his knees, facing up, while his mask faced down into his lap.

Miles stood in front of him.

He was sleeping.

It looked like a trap. It looked like DP was daring someone to test their luck and try to take his gun.

But he was just sleeping. Miles knew this now after that time that Matt had led he and Peter to what had appeared to be the dead body of DP, shot through the heart and arranged by his murderer to be sitting meditatively on the edge of a roof.

DP had been fine. Peter had panicked first, though, and had then become furious. Matt had had to push him back by his shoulders to get him to calm down before he took a swing at DP for giving him a heart attack.

“Wade,” Miles said.

His voice sounded so hoarse. He hadn’t realized how dry his mouth was or how long he’d been moving.

DP’s mask lifted up smoothly.

He made its eyes blink.

“Miles,” he said.

Miles felt abruptly like he was going to sob.

“Wade, someone’s here,” he said, swallowing hard.

DP’s navy and black mask didn’t move. It looked almost scaly in the dying, dim light from the grate a ways away.

“He’s—I think—I think he’s pretending to be me,” Miles whispered. “He’s in my house with my parents.”

DP stood up and Miles immediately took a step back and lifted his chin to stare up at him.

His throat was impossibly tight now.

“Roger that,” DP said tonelessly. “Come with me.”

Wade wasn’t—well, no. That wasn’t right.

 _Their_ Wade wasn’t like any other Spideys’ Wade, Miles had quickly come to find out.

The other Spideys’ Wades were chatty and obnoxious and messy. _Their_ Wade, though, had left the navy without ever really leaving. He was a soldier, first and foremost, and he didn’t talk if he didn’t have to and he didn’t laugh and he didn’t get angry—outwardly at least.

He was all business, all the time. Except with Matt.

He softened around Matt, which infuriated Peter to the point where he couldn’t speak.

That was jealousy, Miles had come to learn.

Peter was jealous that Matt had feelings for Wade. He was trying not to be, and lately, it seemed like he and Matt had settled into some kind of almost-functional, working relationship. But that didn’t mean that Peter wasn’t still simmering under his staunchly held jaw.

DP, on the other hand, had never showed any real malice towards Peter or Miles. Matt had introduced them and Miles had gotten a single pat on the head out of the exchange.

That was it.

That was all.

That was DP’s way of telling Matt that he would now kill and die for Miles in his name, which Matt seemed to find romantic for god knew what reason. Miles didn’t question it. He’d seen DP fight now and there was only one side of him that was safe to be on.

“Did you verify this person’s presence?” DP asked him.

He’d said he didn’t want to talk underground. He said the walls echoed.

So instead, he’d taken Miles to a room—a roost, really, filled with army gear and ammunition—on the tenth floor of a building stuffed full of heat and crying babies and laundry in the middle of being washed and dried.

“I didn’t,” Miles admitted.

“But you can tell this body is present,” DP said.

“I went to Peter’s family’s house and his aunt asked me if I’d forgotten something,” Miles explained. “I haven’t been there in weeks. I was home before that and my shoes and bag were by the door already and everything just…feels really wrong, Wade. Really, super wrong. And I don’t know what to do? Should I—should I go back and confront this guy? Who is he? Maybe there was a mistake? I don’t—I don’t understand. Why—who—what—I don’t—”

“Breathe,” DP said, holding up a hand.

Miles tried to.

“I just panicked,” he blurted out. “I don’t know why. Everything went blank and I just—I felt like I needed to get away. Right then. Immediately. Like everything was out of place and wrong and if I stayed there for any longer someone was going to turn that corner and—”

“It would be you?”

The words died in Miles’s mouth.

DP didn’t drop his stare.

“It would be you?” he asked again.

“Yeah,” Miles said. “It would be…me…why do you say that?”

DP reached across the table in front of him and pulled a small laptop out from under a set of neatly stacked manila envelopes.

He opened it and typed in a password and then turned the thing so that Miles could see it. It was hard to make out what was on the screen, but it seemed to be windows upon windows of different police scanners channels.

Wade hit the spacebar.

“—een that kid—the little Spiderman—spotted on Park and 97th. Someone call Red and Blue and tell him to tell the kid stay back from the crime scene.”

What.

No.

Miles wasn’t—He hadn’t been to Park avenue except to change trains. That was all. That was—

“Is this now?” he asked DP.

DP said nothing.

“DP,” Miles said urgently. “This is being transmitted now?”

DP huffed and sat back.

“You’ve been busy this week, Webs,” he noted.

What? No, he hadn’t been.

“I’ve been at school,” Miles said.

“Busy,” DP repeated.

He hit the spacebar on his laptop again. More voices burst out of it, all talking at once. All talking about that damn Spiderman.

He’d been seen at every bridge. He’d called in multiple perps left waiting for a police escort. He was _everywhere_. During the day, during the night. Calling in robberies. Calling in domestic violence. Asking for escorts for people. Reporting lost kids. The reports were dizzying. They seemed to get louder and louder and _louder_.

“Turn it off,” Miles said. “Turn it _off._ ”

DP didn’t argue. He silenced the chatter and turned slowly back to Miles.

Miles felt warm. Hot. His hands were sweating. His heart was picking up speed.

“That’s a new face from you,” DP rumbled with uncharacteristic emotion. “Are you mad, Webs?”

Was he mad?

Was that what this was?

Maybe.

Possibly.

It was more like, how dare this person try to step in like this. How _dare_ they talk to his mom. Peter’s aunt. How dare they shove Miles out of his own community and dip into his place without even a passing _mention_ of doing it.

It was like they’d done it on purpose. It was like they’d _wanted_ Miles to be there just that little bit too late and to have those awkward moments.

It wasn’t an accident. It was something more. Something that set the Spidey Sense into a low, but growing crackle of static in the back of his head.

“Does Peter know about this?” Miles asked as calmly as he could over the mounting static. His voice didn’t shake somehow, and that hollow feeling from before started to build in his chest again. It yawned open wider and wider.

DP lifted a shoulder.

The gesture almost made Miles laugh for some reason.

It was just so obvious.

Of course DP wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t talk to Peter. He wasn’t trying to work with Peter like Peter was trying to work with him.

“Next time,” Miles said, standing up and picking up his backpack slowly. “You tell me when this kind of thing happens.”

DP lifted his mask to Miles’s face once he’d shouldered the bag.

“We’re a team,” Miles reminded him, staring dead into those white eyes.

DP held his gaze and slowly nodded once. Twice.

“Teams don’t withhold information from each other,” Miles said without dropping his gaze.

“If you say so,” DP said.

“I do,” Miles told him. “I’m going to find Peter. If you notice this _whoever_ doing something else, you tell me or you tell him. Immediately, Wade. That’s what we do on this team. That’s what _Matt_ would want you to do.”

He leaned in on the last bit.

That relationship wasn’t a one-way street.

Miles wasn’t stupid.

He left before getting an answer.

He had to find Peter before this other guy did.


	2. your move

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Matt,” Miles pleaded. “Only good news, give me only good news.”
> 
> Matt said nothing for a moment.
> 
> “Right, so,” he started again.
> 
> NO.

Peter was fine in every way except the fact that he wasn’t answering any of Miles’s calls.

This was rude. Miles always picked up when Peter called. Always.

UGH. What to do what to do what to—

Oh.

Duh.

Matt picked up.

“Y’ello?” he asked cheerfully.

Miles was too agitated to be embarrassed for him.

“Matt, where’s Peter?” he asked. “He’s not answering me and I need to talk to him _now_.”

“Wuh-oh,” Matt said. “Two minutes.”

He hung up.

Miles ducked out from under the awning of a closing grocery store and headed towards a street with restaurant lights still blazing. He did a lap of the block before Matt called back.

“So,” Matt said.

“ _Matt_ ,” Miles pleaded. “Only good news, give me only good news.”

Matt said nothing for a moment.

“Right, so,” he started again.

NO.

“Where is he?” Miles half-shouted into the phone. “Why now? Peter, your _timing, man_. Come _on_.”

Matt sounded a little like he was trying very hard not to laugh and failing.

“I think he’s absorbing vibes in space-time or whatever, kid,” he said. “Deep breaths. It’s no one’s fault. What’s gotten you so riled up in the last fifteen minutes anyways?”

For the love of—

“Matt,” Miles hissed. “Whoever you just saw is not me.”

There was a much, much longer pause.

“Well, given that I didn’t see anyone—”

“Can we not?” Miles interrupted. “Just—can we not with the jokes right now? I’m freaking out, man. Someone’s out here pretending to be me—not even pretending. They’ve got my shoes, my bag, my _mom_ —”

“Wait, hold up,” Matt said. “You’re saying that you weren’t in Hell’s Kitchen fifteen minutes ago?”

“No,” Miles breathed. “I was just with DP. In the Bronx. For the last like, forty-five minutes.”

Matt went quiet again.

“But?” he said. “That—he? It? Smelled like you?”

What? How was that possible?

“Miles, I’m so confused, you really weren’t here? For real, for real? This isn’t a ‘let’s fuck with Matt’ situation?”

Miles had never fucked with Matt like that. Why would he even think that was an option?

“I’m not messing around,” Miles said seriously. “I don’t know who that guy is, but he was at my house talking to my mom, he talked to May, and he’s been doing my job all week. It’s all wrong. I don’t know what he wants from me or us. I don’t know if he’s like Bitsy or somethin’, from another verse—”

Wait.

Maybe it was Bitsy. Maybe that’s how he knew everything and everyone. Maybe—But that didn’t make sense. Bitsy had his own verse and his own mom and dad and his own Spiderman team. What would he want with Miles’s?

“Miles? You cut out there or something, kid. I didn’t—”

“Matt,” Miles said. “I’ve gotta go, I’ve gotta ask someone something. Can you keep trying to get ahold of Peter? Tell him to call me as soon as he can.”

“O? Kay?”

“Thanks, I love you, bye!”

Miles hung up and stared at his hands.

Bitsy. He had to talk to Bitsy. But first, he needed to get off this street. People were starting to notice him.

He found a park and threw himself into reaching for Bitsy. He had no idea what time it was for the guy, but that was too bad for everyone, all the way around. He pushed and screwed his eyes shut, trying to feel for the pinging of his Spidey Sense off another Spiderman’s.

After a beat or two, the pull intensified and he almost sagged in relief before catching himself.

Bitsy opened the window between them.

Miles stared.

Bitsy stared back.

“Dude,” Miles said. “Your hair.”

“If you’re not answering my prayers for sweet death, I can’t help you,” Bitsy said stiffly.

Dude.

Wait, no. Back on track.

This was bad.

“You’re in your verse,” Miles said. “Right there, you’ve been there the whole time. All day. _All week_. Confirm or deny.”

Bitsy’s eyes widened owlishly.

“Confirm?” he said.

Damn.

“Some doppleganger is trying to replace me in this verse,” Miles said.

It sounded bonkers as an out-loud sentence, but he didn’t know how else to phrase it. Bitsy accepted it into his heart with an understandable expression.

“Cool?” he said.

“I think he’s trying to drive me out,” Miles explained seriously, “I don’t know what to do. My Peter’s not answering his phone and I thought—I _hoped_ that you were just playing a trick on me.”

“Not cool,” Bitsy translated.

“That’s what I’m sayin’,” Miles sighed. “Is this happening to you?”

“Me? No,” Bitsy said. “Spidey? Uh, yeah. You want me to grab him for you?”

Wh—

Wait.

“This is happening to your Spidey?” Miles repeated, slower this time.

Bitsy shrugged.

“It happens to him pretty much constantly,” he said. “People are always trying to take his job.”

That—

No. No, this was different.

“Pay attention,” Miles said. “This guy is trying to steal my identity, my home, and my life.”

“Yeah, I heard you, bro,” Bitsy said. “And this guy showed up out of nowhere, like, exactly Spidey’s size and talking with a weird old Queens accent and he tried to tell us that he was Spidey, which is _nuts_. Because Spidey talks like Wade and Wade talks like a guy who heard gangsters on TV in the 40s and decided that he was going to stick with that for life.”

“What’s Tats doing about it? Has he told you anything?” Miles asked hurriedly.

“I believe that he’s decided to set the guy on fire,” Bitsy deadpanned. “But no, for real. He kind of has a way of dealing with this by now, it’s happened so many times. He just lets whoever it is try to be him. Just like, flat out, ‘go ahead.’ You know? Because his life is kind of—uh. Let’s just say ‘a lot’ is generous. And anyways, it always works. His doubles never last.”

Word.

So, question: how does one set someone on fire without killing them?

“Okay, so apparently you gotta let them go to Stark Industries and try to get through security,” Bitsy said.

“I don’t have a Stark Industries or security,” Miles said. “Is there any other way?”

Bitsy frowned deeply and worked his jaw.

“Let me ask,” he said. “I’ll ask Spidey to commune with the Peters too if he gets a moment and to send your guy your way if he gets ahold of him.”

Beautiful. Amazing.

“You’re the best us,” Miles said.

Bitsy snickered.

“No, you,” he said. “Best of luck, man. See you around.”

Miles had barely closed his empty dorm’s window when someone tried to assault him from behind or rather--as Matt tried to claim immediately after nearly losing an arm to super-strength—tried to tap him on the shoulder.

“Peter’s not answering his phone,” Matt reported. “This calls for a home visit.”

Miles blinked up at him.

“At 10pm?” he asked.

“Not to worry,” Matt said brightly. “We have two boundaries in our friendship and late night visits are not one of them.”

Miles was so tired. He’d been bouncing around the five boroughs like a pingpong ball for coming on six hours with no end in sight. Going back to Queens did not sound appealing in the least.

Going back home-home where that…whoever might be sleeping in his own bed was even less so.

“Matt,” he said after a while. “What does it feel like when you go full-devil?”

Matt cocked his head.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never let everything consume me before.”

“But you’ve gotten close, right?” Miles asked him, feeling more and more exhausted with every word.

Matt let the train shake him around. The silence that stretched out between them seemed to shake with it too.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve gotten close.”

“I got so mad today, I felt like, empty,” Miles sighed.

Matt lifted his head up towards the advertisements around the top of the car’s ceiling.

“Sometimes it can feel empty,” he said. “But a lot of times, you don’t know whether you want to scream or cry.”

Yeah. Yeah, that was it.

“I got really mad at Wade,” Miles admitted. “I think I was kind of horrible to him.”

Matt sighed. His hand found its way to Miles’s shoulder and he squeezed once.

“He’s used to it,” he said.

The rest of the ride felt just as uncomfortable as that conversation.

Peter wasn’t home.

He wasn’t with MJ, who answered the door sleepily and said that he hadn’t been home for a few nights now. He wasn’t with May who gave Miles a long stare with a furrowed brow. He wasn’t with DP or Foggy or any of his and Matt’s mutual friends.

Matt rubbed at his face in thought outside a building in Queens with a piercing blue streetlamp. It had so many stickers layered over its base that it nearly glistened in the dark.

“Johnny,” Matt finally said. “He’s either with Johnny or not in this verse.”

Great.

Just one thing.

“Who’s Johnny?” Miles asked.

They didn’t make it to Manhattan because Matt pointed out that if Peter had been gone for 2 days, then it made more sense to go check to see if Miles’s impersonator was still at his home first.

If he was, then they could size him up and see what they were dealing with. If he wasn’t, then they could table this until Miles wasn’t so tired.

Peter couldn’t stay out of their verse for more than 72 hours. If they were looking at around 48 presently, then he would definitely be back tomorrow, regardless of what he was doing and who he was with.

Miles was too sleepy to argue. He let Matt drag him towards home, but they got tripped up on the bus going west.

Everything about the bus was normal for 11 o’ clock at night on a Friday. A homeless man talked to himself in the back seat. A few people with plastic bags in their hands dozed, hunched over in the middle of the bus. Miles guided Matt up to the driver and Matt told her where he wanted to be dropped off. And then Miles guided him to a pair of seats in the last third of the bus, across from two people with their heads bent in towards each other.

They looked like they were planning something unsavory.

If Miles had been wearing the suit, he’d have followed them for a bit.

One of them wore sunglasses with shiny blue and purple lenses and a beanie. The other had a notebook in hand and a flat-cap on. He wore a set of chunky, heavy framed glasses and had in his hand and honest-to-god pencil.

That was Captain America.

Miles was sitting on the bus across from Captain America who actually, literally thought that wearing a flat-cap in this day and age would help him be less recognizable.

Miles was sitting across from Captain America who _took the bus?_

Did he know how to drive? Did he not have an apartment with a parking space?

Wasn’t his thing motorcycles?

There were so many questions.

“—need to be _seen_ with him Steve. With him. As in standing next to. As in, in the same room as—”

“—and I get that but—”

“Like Batman, alright? Has Bruce Wayne ever been in the same room as Batman?”

Cap’s eyebrows flattened.

“As Batman,” he said just as flatly.

“Did I stutter? Yes. As Batman. Answer the question,” Sam Wilson said.

“I don’t know, why don’t you just let me check their fucking _calendars_ , Sam—oh hm, looks like they had a Thursday lunch they both had to cancel for— _what does it matter_? This is real life. Not Batman.”

“Don’t take that tone with me,” Sam Wilson threatened, getting up in Cap’s face over there. “I know you’re stupid, but you’re not _that_ stupid. The point _is_ that no one is gonna believe any of us if we don’t have proof.”

“We have proof,” Cap hissed back. “Parker’s competent—don’t get me wrong—but he’s not _this_ competent, and he’s missing all that—” Cap waved a hand around in a gesture that Miles somehow understood as ‘anger.’

“—yeah, to _us_ ,” Sam Wilson said. “But who else can tell, Steve? What proof do we have? All this stalking has got us squat. It’s gonna be his word against ours, and he’s the one wearing the mask.”

Were they suggesting what Miles thought they were?

“So what do you suggest we do then?” Cap asked. “Just? Drop it?”

Sam Wilson slouched back in his seat, and crossed his arms over his chest, thinking. He rubbed his lips together.

“We need someone who can verify that we’re not hallucinating,” he said.

Miles felt his fingers twitch in Matt’s jacket and Matt held completely still. He’d been listening, too. He had to have been. Miles waited for him to move and when he didn’t, slowly started to close his fingers.

Matt turned away towards the window and held his face.

He was thinking too, now. Doing equations. Acrobatics.

“It’s not gonna happen,” Cap sighed in the other seat. “No one knows Parker like that—except maybe his wife.”

“So we ask the wife,” Sam Wilson said. “If he’s with her, great. That’s us done.”

MJ was at home. MJ was sleeping in an empty apartment. No. _No_ , not you too, Peter.

“He can’t be with the wife, though,” Cap said. “Like, logistically. He’s been with us constantly for four days, Sam.”

“And?”

“Look at me. Four. Days.”

Four days. No. That didn’t make sense. None of this was making sense.

Peter could only stay in their verse for 72 hours at a time. He couldn’t be with anyone constantly for that period. He had to leave—even if it was just for a short period. Maybe an hour or two.

“Christ,” Sam Wilson groaned into his palms. “Christ. Fuck.”

Cap leaned back into his seat, mimicking Sam Wilson’s posture.

“Pretty much,” he sighed.

There was only one possible thing going on here and it made Miles sick to his stomach.

Peter had a double, too.


	3. start game: enter the king

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I don’t have time for your games. Fight me or run like the coward you are.”  
> Hm.  
> “Alright,” Matt said.  
> “Wh—wait! Where are you going? WAIT.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: reference to use of racial slur (slur not included in text) and references to suicidal ideation/thoughts. Please do what you need to to keep yourselves safe.
> 
> pov Murderdock

“ _Ojisan_?”

Matt hadn’t imagined that. He definitely hadn’t imagined that. He couldn’t have; it was—no.

“ _Ojisan_?”

Samuel sounded upset. It was difficult to discern if it Matt suddenly swiping him up into arms and gunning it that had caused that or if he was just now translating the words that Spiderbrat had said to him.

Said to _him_. In her own voice. With her own mouth. This was unprecedented. This was uncharacteristic. Matt knew this monster-teen by now, largely against his will, yes, but regardless, he had catalogued a whole series of her tendencies, tones, and relationships.

He was no fool. He knew his enemy. He knew _all_ his enemies.

Sam made a soft sound against Matt’s neck and curled fingers into his collar, and it was as though between steps, Matt had passed through a forcefield of boiling water. His hand came up unbidden to curl around the back of the boy’s head.

“She didn’t say that,” he said firmly.

Because she couldn’t have.

Because Gwen-Stacy-Spiderwoman knew Samuel. Because Gwen-Stacy-Spiderwoman _loved_ Samuel. Because Gwen-Stacy-Spiderwoman would never, in her whole fucking life, use a slur like that. Not to a child, and especially not to Sam.

So there was only one option left and it set every klaxon in Matt’s head to screaming and every bump of his skin to tingling:

That had not been Gwen Stacy.

So who was it?

Samuel asked him very quietly what the slur meant when Matt set him down in the apartment.

It was hard. It was so _hard_. Ten years ago, it would have been easy. Ten years ago, Matt could have answered this question without flinching.

But ten years ago, he hadn’t woken up twice a week with Sammy’s fragile chest rising and falling against his own. He hadn’t been invited into a cardboard rocketship by soft fingers that asked him if Cat could be an alien for an hour or so, until _okasan_ got home from work.

This boy had made Matt soft. He made him remember what the world was like outside the empire. Outside the Hand’s suffocating shadows. It made him remember holding Mom’s last two fingers—whining about it, saying he was too big for that, already--right before she let go of them in the face of that oncoming truck.

That, on top of the fact that Matt knew this was not the first time Samuel had heard that word and that he understood from the tone what it was used for, if not what it meant, made everything that much harder.

“That’s not Spiderwoman,” Matt said instead.

Samuel sniffed and his heat started to migrate up to his face. He made a gesture that Matt was now familiar with. It was a subtle movement concentrated around the two small balls heat that were his warm palms. Matt used to miss it a lot, not just because it was too close to the heat of Sam’s chest to be able to make out, but because it was generally aborted halfway through.

But not this time. This time the hands came up.

Christ.

“Come here,” Matt said in Japanese, crouching down and gathering his nephew—his _nephew,_ God help them all—against his shoulder. The boy was blazing. Nearly feverish.

“That wasn’t Spiderwoman. That wasn’t Gwen,” Matt emphasized. He pulled back and brushed knuckles against the side of Samuel’s face until he found his eyes. He brushed the tears away as best as he could as a tsunami of fury swelled in the deep ocean of his own chest.

“It’s time to go home,” he said.

Elektra didn’t understand why Matt was bringing her son back to her after she’d clearly told him to leave him with the Stacys. Her tone was jagged around the edges with frustration when he told her that the Stacys weren’t a suitable childcare choice.

It was easier to argue than explain. They’d done this one before—a few times now. The tracks were well-worn and easy to follow and Elektra eventually flailed around and said “Fine—I don’t have time for this. Take him to Nelson or whoever you want— _not Otomo_. Do _not_ give him to Otomo again, you hear me?”

He did indeed.

Samuel played his part in this exchange well, knowing somehow that what he’d just experienced was not a topic of conversation that _okasan_ needed to participate in. He dug fingers into the seams of Matt’s pants pockets and held on tight.

Elektra dismissed them both after a moment. The clack of her mask going down was followed by the clack of the window closing, which left Matt standing in a rapidly cooling apartment, likely in darkness. The fingers in his back pocket twisted.

“ _Okasan_ is gonna be mad,” Sam said in Japanese.

Hm.

Maybe.

“ _Ojisan_ , is Spiderwoman lost?”

Maybe.

“Are you gonna save her?”

Hm.

Maybe.

Otomo was more than happy to look after the boy for the time being; he said so without a trace of deceit in his tone.

“No _Doraemon_ this time,” Matt reported sadly. “His mother disapproves.”

He didn’t have to see Otomo’s face to recognize the sudden agony these foul words had caused.

“English only again?” Otomo asked.

“That’s a negative,” Matt said. “He will choose what he is most comfortable using with you.”

“Cantonese?”

“Mandarin if Chinese.”

“Understood. He’ll be looked after.”

Damn right he would.

“When will you be returning?”

Unclear. Whenever the real Spider was located and secured. Whenever an apology from whoever the hell that other Spider was had been procured and/or extracted by force.

“Definitely by six,” Matt said. “I’ll let you know half an hour in advance.”

Childless, he headed back to Queens.

It was a thankless borough, he had to say. He would have avoided it entirely if it wasn’t teeming with potential recruits and various hubs of his sort of activity. It was warm that night, but the air smelled metallic. Like ozone. Like rain.

He heard the ‘thwip’ and spun around with his fingers curling around his stick, but it was too late. The metal was jerked out from his fingers. He couldn’t stop his eyes from widening in shock.

“Murderdock,” a voice said. “We meet again.”

Hm. Once again: this wasn’t right. That move was too fast, too smooth, too calculated. This voice was too calm. The heartbeat unrecognizable.

“Hello? Is someone there? Who are you?” he asked.

“Your worst nightmare,” the Spider said. “Don’t you remember?”

“I’m sorry, hon, you must be confused,” Matt said slowly. “I’m just a—”

“Just a blind man?” the Spider asked.

She sounded—ah. There it was.

Too old. He took a measured breath and brought himself up to standing, then leaning—casually of course.

“Ms. Stacy,” he said smoothly, “I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again, I’m very much blind. This is not a game, and frankly, I had hoped that your parents—oh. I’m sorry, dear, your _father_ had raised you better than that.”

The Spider’s heartbeat wavered slightly in Matt’s ears.

“Don’t you talk about my father,” the Spider threatened in what she seemed to think was a low growl.

Matt laughed long and measured until the heartbeat reverberating in his ears started to pick up speed. He cleared his throat and adjusted his tie and hunted out the heat of the woman’s head to smile at. He pushed the smile into his cheeks, made it curl—just enough to sow a seed.

“You’re sure getting older, Ms. Stacy,” he noted. “Last time we chatted, it was about babysitting, and now look at you, all grown up and hissing.”

“Baby what?”

Ahoy! Captain, straight ahead; look at the leap in that pulse. Behold, a mistake realized.

“Babysitting?” Matt offered helpfully through his grin. “You know. That thing where my foolish sister gives you money in exchange for keeping her whelp from sticking his fingers into electrical outlets? That babysitting?”

“Y—your sister?”

Stammering now, friend? Getting a little nervous?

Matt made a show of cocking his head, pushing the smile into relentless territory.

“Oh? Don’t you remember?” he asked.

There was a long pause.

“You’re lying,” the Spider said.

“Am I?” Matt asked. “I must say, I’m surprised, Ms. Stacy, I thought that this was the one point which we mutually agreed on.”

He took a step forward and heard the Spider’s resolve shudder in the crunch of one of her feet. He took another step when it didn’t move. Then another. Then another, until he was standing close enough that he could feel her breath through the fabric of her mask.

He held that moment for a long time, letting her come to grips with his full height and the closeness, then he carefully telegraphed his movements as he liberated his stick from her grip.

“You don’t have a sister,” the Spider spat.

Matt stepped back with his stick once again at home in his hand.

“Are you so sure about that?” he asked.

“I don’t have time for your games. Fight me or run like the coward you are.”

Hm.

“Alright,” Matt said.

“Wh—wait! Where are you going? WAIT.”

He didn’t turn back. He had what he needed.

He got maybe two blocks ahead when a sharp movement behind him made instinct take over. The sneaky palm went sailing with its owner into the gutter and Matt brushed off his sleeve.

A rumble vibrated somewhere deep down inside his chest.

He caught the incoming fist, then grabbed the other one before it could join the party. Both writhed in his grasp and the tension behind them twisted.

He dropped the right one to catch the upcoming ankle. He got fingers around it and gave a sharp yank that the imposter-Spider hadn’t been expecting. Matt heard the air rasp out of her lungs as she hit the pavement. He dropped the leg and listened to the scrape of fabric on rough sandpaper as she started to push herself back up.

“Ms. Spider,” he said before she could. “Why so desperate today, hm? Are you trying to silence me? I’m getting a different kind of—oh, what is it you kids call it these days? Ah. A _vibe_. Your vibes are all outta whack—”

“Shut _up_.”

There was silence.

She was threatening him with something. Not a gun—no, that wasn’t Spiderwoman’s style. Not a phone or another instrument—there was no humming or clanking of batteries in a metal container. A hand, then. Yes. The heat extended closest to him was about the size of a small fist.

Web then. She thought she was going to shoot web in his face.

Did she think that was…a threat?

Oh, hm. Hm, indeed. Well. We’re here now, let’s see what happens.

He hooked the stick’s loop around his thumb and lifted both of his hands until his elbows felt like they were at right angles.

“Now, now,” he said, “There’s no need for things to get messy.”

“You’re going down, Murderdock,” the imposter said. “On your knees.”

Um?

“Aren’t you a little young—”

“ON YOUR KNEES.”

“No need to shout,” Matt said. He started to kneel.

And she fell for it.

He closed the dumpster. The scream inside was muffled, but Matt didn’t give it a second thought.

The real Gwen Stacy didn’t try to shoot web at him anymore, no, she had new trump cards now. And Matt had to hand it to her: she played them well.

Over time, the Spider had come to learn that he was a complicated man with complicated relationships, although just how complicated, he was fairly certain she had no real idea. Furthermore, she did not appreciate just what the results of her card-clutching were.

The long and short of it was like this:

Matt was becoming fatigued with propping up an ever-expanding underground empire. And certain persons named after certain appendages had noticed this. Unfortunately for those persons, certain _other_ persons had noticed much more keenly and quickly and had offered a standing opportunity to relieve the fatigue, if, and only if, a decision was made.

Elektra.

Twin weapons forged in the same fire was how the Hand had once described her and Matt—quite proudly if Matt was being honest here. But that pride had faded somewhat over the last fifteen years, because Elektra had abandoned ship. And rather miserably for the Hand’s relentless auditing of Matt’s general existence, it turns out that sometimes, the enemy of your friend is _not_ your enemy, but rather the only person who could ever possibly understand you and what you’ve been through.

So _sometimes_ , your friend’s enemy is _actually_ the greatest threat to the relationship between yourself and the so-called-friend, and then the so-called-friend realizes that you, yourself are starting to realize that, and god help us all if you have anyone besides your so-called-friend in your life, so the so-called-friend issues a kill order on your secret ally and then pretends that they didn’t to your face and—

The point.

Was.

That Matt was perhaps just a little fatigued at the moment, you know? With the empire, yes, but also with the Hand.

It was embarrassing for everyone really. A travesty in the making, and Matt couldn’t even say that they’d made their own bed there, champ, because at the end of the day--he had admitted to himself in a lukewarm bath in an even stiller apartment--it wasn’t.

It was his own fault.

See, Matt was the one who’d fucked things up. As per usual. As per always. It was sort of his M.O.

He had a fatal flaw. He would never be rid of it. It was what found him sitting behind an office door that no one would dare open last year, tracing the edge of a blade and thinking to himself ‘what’s left?’ ‘Would anyone notice?’ ‘Would it even matter?’

Stick called it ‘empathy’ one time, nearly two decades ago.

He’d taken Matt’s then-small hands and had turned them over in his own so that he was cupping the knuckles in warm palms, and he’d told Matt, sincerely, that he needed to stop crying for the men that he hesitated to kill.

‘These men have murdered so many more then us,’ he’d said. ‘These men have created ripples of suffering throughout this country and others that are growing into tidal waves of tragedy for individuals like you, like me, like your mother and father.’

Matt didn’t call it ‘empathy’ anymore, though. That wasn’t really want it was.

He called it loneliness.

He called it insecurity.

And even beyond that, what it really was, at the heart of it all, was fear.

Matt was afraid to be afraid, and everything, _everything_ that he’d ever done was tainted by that.

This very empire that he now stood upon was undermined by that fear of fear and that very same fear was making him make stupid mistakes like making trump cards.

For example.

That impending feeling of dread, of silence, of his name and life flickering out, to be heard again on no one’s lips was assuaged in the heat of Foggy’s thick forearms pressed against the small of his back. It dissipated like frightened moths when Foggy laid the bridge of his nose and his lips against the column of Matt’s throat.

Foggy teased. Foggy huffed. Foggy told him when he was being outrageous and incoherent and socially awkward, and the relief that came with someone finally putting a name to the things that he was feeling was so overwhelming that Matt could have laughed.

Foggy told him sometimes that he seemed anxious. He told him that he seemed depressed. He had names for all of the feelings that Matt had and had never stopped to truly think about. And despite Foggy having a mental list of all the emotions that made Matt useless and weak and a disgrace to the Hand, he stayed after they’d fucked. He came over and sat in the living room while Matt ranted and worked and barely paid him any attention for hours on end.

He stayed.

Where no one else ever had, Foggy stayed.

He was Trump Card 1, the King.

Trump Card 2 was the Queen, Elektra. She breezed back into Matt’s life just was he was getting used to the pressure of Foggy’s weight pinning him to sheets that were not his own.

Elektra walked in and gone was insecurity.

Elektra had promised Matt once, twenty years ago in a holding cell that was no longer, that she would never leave him and that they would always get back up on their feet. When he didn’t know what to do, he’d had Elektra who’d help him figure out the way forward.

She was decisive where he wavered and then, where she wavered, he was decisive. Together, they could fill each other’s gaps and make one whole freestanding person.

Together as one.

She came back to New York City after years spent in east Asia and he’d tried to chase her out and back to the islands and continent, but she celebrated upon seeing him. The first thing she did was offer him family once more.

She called him brother. In exchange for nothing, she gave him what he thought he’d lost forever through bullets and comas and acid more cruel than any had the right to be. And then, once she’d done that, she offered him the last one. The last card.

Trump Card 3, the Jack.

God fucking help him.

Samuel was turning seven in three months. His Japanese was nearly fluent. He could write in it and Mandarin. His English was shaky still, but his favorite way to learn was to bring home library books that George Stacy had checked out for him. He asked Matt to read them to him.

Matt couldn’t.

He didn’t know when that had started to ache as much as it did.

Sam still forgot about the blindness sometimes, even having been informed of Matt’s limitations, but not in an ableist way. More in a way where he was just so excited about sharing something with Matt that it didn’t cross his mind that Matt might not be able to partake. And then when he realized, Sam would find some other way to do it.

He’d started trying to read the books to Matt lately.

He wasn’t even seven and he’d lived the hell Matt and Elektra had starting from four years old and he didn’t understand what was happening to him or why sometimes he wanted to hide under beds all day long. That was his normal.

Sensei had called it ‘empathy.’

Matt called it ‘hope.’

The boy brought him hope. The one thing he hadn’t know he’d been missing. The one fear he hadn’t been able to identify.

Samuel didn’t have to make the mistakes that Matt had. He could be extraordinary—he already was. And Matt could be a part of that.

Somehow, he already was.

Hope felt like a closing throat, answered by tears.

These were the cards. The mistakes.

A lover.

A sister.

A nephew.

These, the Spider protected, so long as Matt kept them valuable to her. And not only that was very convenient, but it also changed Gwen Stacy’s role in the larger game. She became a knight, not a king anymore, and even better, she unwittingly joined the same side of the board as Matt himself. She admired Elektra. She and her father gushed over Samuel. Foggy gave her what she needed to do what she wanted to do.

With her emotions all twisted up with those three, Matt could use her to keep them from harm while he himself was locked in on all sides, trying to decide what to do with an ever-growing empire that he was rapidly growing fatigued with.

The Spider was no longer a threat. The Spider was a boon. And this imposter, who was clearly operating within a different set of rules from the carefully arranged ones, was throwing a wrench in the whole thing, weakening the one place Matt couldn’t afford to have weakened.

Gwen Stacy had to be relocated. This imposter needed to be removed from play.

So what do you do next, Matthew Michael? What is the next move in this game of chess?

Well first, you find Gwen Stacy. The real Gwen Stacy. And then you go from there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not going to state which slur Imposter!Gwen used, so please don't ask ❤👍


	4. check your colors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Olly olly oxenfree,” Matt sung softly. “The game’s over, Ms. Stacy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References to reckless driving and drugs.

Three guesses where Gwen Stacy would be hiding:

1) Queens.

Yes, he was here already. Where next?

2) Home.

She was not there. The imposter was guarding it like a hound, reeking of dumpster (teehee).

3) Park?

There was one nearby but the swings didn’t creak and there was no discernable panting or rustling in the area.

Park? Definitely haunted. Avoid.

Rerouting. Backtrack. There was an easier way to do this.

“ _Oijisaaaaaaaaan_.”

Otomo was making a strong facial expression that they both knew Matt couldn’t see, Matt could just about taste it.

“You said six,” Otomo said.

“The situation developed,” Matt said.

Sam buried his face into Matt’s abs and hummed.

“I will pay you any amount of money,” Otomo said.

“To keep him? You’re going soft, old man. I’m afraid I’m not in control of that decision,” Matt said.

Otomo made a complicated sound that Matt’s brain decided was one of frustration.

“ _Ojisan_ , we made pancakes,” Sam reported brightly. “ _Otomo-san_ made a robot.”

Oh? A man of many talents, Otomo was, wasn’t he, nephew? Say bye now.

“Byeeeeee. I’ll bring you pictures next time, okay?”

Otomo made another complex sound. Matt took that as a submission of future babysitting availability.

He put Spiderwoman’s biggest fan on the scent by convincing him that Spiderwoman had fallen down a manhole and been replaced by an alligator masquerading as a human. This was all it took for a six-year-old; if only drug lords were so easy.

“ _Oneesan_ likes it up high,” Sam informed him, taking measured, determined steps ahead of Matt.

“What kind of high?” Matt asked.

“Cat high.”

Matt double checked the surrounding areas. They refused to come into focus. Probably fog or something.

“Cat is very short,” he pointed out.

“Cat jumps up high. Spiderwoman jumps up high, too.”

Matt adjusted his field of awareness up about a story higher. Sniffing around brought nothing out of the ordinary. A couple was arguing over Yankee candles in one block of flats while their neighbor blared WWE from a shitty tv speaker. Someone else was trying to spit in an alley while a bass thrummed insistently from a nearby club.

“Like Cat,” Sam repeated to himself.

Matt tried to locate the nephew and realized that Samuel had stopped walking. Matt reached out for him and moved forward until his hand met hair. Sam tipped his head back into Matt’s palm and shifted his weight and the angle of his shoulders.

“Cat,” he said.

He was pointing.

“ _Oneesan_?” Matt asked.

Sam hummed.

“Cat,” he repeated.

Ah. Yes, well, this did come the territory of tracking with a first-grader.

“We aren’t looking for cats, remember?” Matt said.

“No. _Cat_.”

Wh—wait. Cat? As in Cat-Cat? Matt’s Cat?

“He musta taken the train,” Sam said as a very familiar yowl sounded out from somewhere over their heads.

Matt turned his face towards it. Cat made his unhappy sound again.

Matt did not need Sam to cheer him on in rescuing his Lordship, but he had to say that it was a little endearing that he did anyways.

Cat hissed at him for having crashed his escape party. Matt stuffed him in his jacket. He would be fine. He liked it in there.

Matt climbed down from the fence and landed carefully next to Sam. He handed his Lordship over with instructions for a tight grip. Cat flailed and hissed as he was wont. Sam took him gamely.

“Cat wants to help find _Oneesan_ ,” he decided.

Matt realized abruptly that this was accompanied by the kid stooping down and letting Cat’s claws scratch at the pavement.

Nope—not today, Satan.

He snatched the beast back up before sweet freedom was attained.

“Cat does not like Spiders,” he told Sam.

Sam’s silence was telling of his insubordination. Matt scowled down in his general direction and started to open his mouth to nip that in the bud when Cat started squirming insistently in his arms. Claws found Matt’s knuckles and adjusting his grip just resulted in them sticking into his suit instead.

People always said never to work with children or animals. And Matt was starting to feel like there was something to that.

He dropped his Lordship.

Cat huddled down as a little ball of heat a ways away and hissed. His paws started to pick up speed. Another scuffle joined them, and then belatedly, Matt realized he was standing all on his own, abandoned by both child and beast.

Goddamnit.

He relocated Sam and Cat fairly quickly at the foot of something that reflected sound, probably a brick wall. He swept both up, one under each arm, and had just about resolved to lock the two in a dumpster of their own while he went out and found Gwen Stacy himself when he heard the wheeze.

He went still and hushed the dependents.

The wheeze was congested. Soft. It was on the other side of the hard sound-absorber. Matt turned towards the thing and considered it.

Hard—concrete or brick. Sound came from above it. The humidity didn’t seem as strong up there as it was down at the ground.

Maybe ten feet high? Possibly one to one and half feet thick? If it was brick, it would be an easy climb. If it was—WAIT, YOU FOUL ANIMAL.

He was never working with either of these ingrates again.

Sam, at a sporting 3’6”, was just tall enough to reach the top of the wall from Matt’s shoulders. He got ahold of the top of the wall easily enough, then hopped up and yelped as he slipped off the edge nigh immediately. Cat, Matt could only imagine, was laughing at him. At both of them, really, since Matt had to backtrack a bit to get a running start to join them. He grabbed Cat before he could escape once he was up there himself and then tried to find Sam. He did, but not on the wall. Sam was huffing at the bottom, calling Cat unkind names in Mandarin.

Matt wondered where he’d learned such language from.

(Trick question. It was Elektra.)

He let the boy stew for a moment while he listened for the wheezing from before. It didn’t come. In terms of living-human-finding, that was not optimal.

He joined Sam on the ground with Cat once again stuffed in his jacket.

“Shhh,” he said. “Listen.”

The boy settled down. Matt twisted his head back and forth, waiting. Stretching. Listening.

The wheeze had become muffled. It wasn’t far away. It echoed slightly, as though it came from between two hard objects, one metallic--it didn’t absorb sound like the brick wall did.

“Olly olly oxenfree,” Matt sung softly. “The game’s over, Ms. Stacy.”

The breathing cut off immediately.

Gotcha.

“ _Oneesan?_ ”

Wait—no—

“ _Oneesan_? _Onee_ — _Ojisan_!”

Ffffffff. Yes, oh Great Un-stealthy One?

Sam’s breathing quickened and his pulse jack-rabbited. Matt grimaced.

“There’s blood,” Samuel whispered.

Here we go.

“How much?” Matt asked, dropping Cat to approach whatever it was that Sam was crouching by.

“Don’t touch!” Sam snapped as Matt went to put his hand down. “A lot.”

The breathing had started again under this metal, foul-smelling thing. A car, maybe? It was smooth and wet.

Christ.

“Ms. Stacy?” Matt asked, “Give us a sign of life, perhaps?”

Nothing.

“ _Oneesan_? Spiderwoman?” Sam asked to no answer. Matt pushed him out of the way and knelt down to reach under the vehicle. His sleeve got caught on something metal sticking out from the undercarriage, but he pressed on past it until the tips of his fingers brushed something soft.

Hair.

It was wet.

The smell of blood down on the ground was overwhelming, iron and salt and rot with every turn of Matt’s head.

Well. That wouldn’t do.

“Hold Cat,” he told Sam. “And close your eyes.”

He had to squeeze behind the car from the other side. It was parallel-parked obscenely close to the alley wall and Stacy’s body was wedged under it from that side.

Her breathing was even now. She’d passed out.

That was bad. Very bad. It was concerning enough that she was hiding and there was so much blood, but for her—Spiderwoman—to have lost her balance like this?

Perhaps this was whole thing was messier than Matt had thought.

He had to squirm down and then shove Stacy’s body further under the car, and then further still, until he could no longer reach it from where he was laying. Then he wriggled out and went back around to go flatten himself in the blood on the other side to get ahold of her wrists and pull.

She was heavy for someone with such thin wrists. Matt told Sam harshly to keep his eyes closed as he worked the rest of her body out.

He knew it wasn’t pretty. Just moving Stacy like this was bound to leave abrasions from the glass and grit and oil under the vehicle; with her more or less in his lap now, he could feel heat seeping out through his pants, too.

She needed more expertise than Matt had at hand.

Yeesh.

Alright, come on Murdock. Let’s think. Who’s around here? Who’s in Queens? George Stacy was out. Metro Gen was too far away. The doc who Matt routinely trusted to stitch up his various stab wounds wasn’t necessary out of range, but carrying this dead weight was going to cause some attention.

Hm hm hm.

Think, Murdock.

“Gwen?”

“Close ‘em,” Matt reordered.

Samuel made a sound of distress and in doing so, reminded Matt that there were actually three bodies here that he had to lug around.

Hrgh.

He leaned back on a palm and his hand brushed something rough and rubbery. He caught himself twisting back towards the tires of the car behind them.

Hm. Now there was a thought.

Could Matt drive?

Sometimes.

 _Should_ Matt drive?

It depended on who you asked. According to Otomo? Never.

But desperate times, dear keeper, call for desperate measures, and luckily for Matt, he even had a working set of eyes with him.

Sam told him which wires were which colors reluctantly and the blood-stained car roared to life soon after. Samuel then informed him that _okasan_ said that he wasn’t allowed to get into a car with Matt at the wheel ever, ever, ever, no matter how dire the circumstances.

 _Okasan_ , Matt explained, wouldn’t know what Sam didn’t tell her. He put the kid in the backseat with Cat to hold onto. He then lifted Stacy’s heavy body from the ground and arranged her the best he could on the passenger’s side of things. That done, he wiped his hands on his pants and opened his phone. He navigated to Google Maps.

This was bound to be exciting.

Doc Reynolds said that the next time Matt needed her, he could just _call_. Matt translated this to her being upset about the whole parking space situation. He ensured her that the blood and the glass and that piece of metal that she called the ‘fender’ would be mopped up by morning. The elevator would be cleaned and repaired, too. Was would her doorstep. And the parking garage entrance. Not to worry, he had everything under control.

Sam, thankfully, had decided that it was bedtime about ten minutes after arrival. Doc Reynolds set him up in her office with a throw to sleep on. Matt made a note to have her paid double this month for the hospitality.

Doc Reynolds declared Stacy damaged, but stable. She said that she’d lost a lot of blood and she was in rough shape, but she probably wouldn’t be pushing up daisies any time soon. Her healing factor, allegedly, was already taking care of some of the minor abrasions. Reynolds’s voice took on a wider tone as she explained this.

“It’s weird,” the good doctor said, “I swear I just saw her on the 11 o’ clock news. I didn’t realize that she was one of yours, Mr. Murdock.”

Yeah, well. He hadn’t either.

Doctor Reynolds quickly elected to stop asking questions at his refusal to answer any more. She was a wise woman. She stripped Stacy from her suit which she described as ‘shredded’ and went about bathing the girl’s wounds and packing those which required it. Stacy remained unconscious throughout, although her breath hitched every now and then with Doc’s stronger movements.

Matt left them to it and went to sit at Doc’s desk in her office, across from Samuel on the couch.

He had to think.

What now?

What next?

Cat scrambled up into his lap and Matt stroked his back.

Stacy woke up at around 10am that morning while Matt was trying to find something denser than Cat to put his phone under.

Elektra’s shriek was relentless. Foggy was calling him on the other line, no doubt having remembered another point to make about that mysterious red-haired man involved in a high-speed car chase down Northern Boulevard earlier that day.

Matt personally didn’t understand why everyone was up in arms. He hadn’t hit a single other vehicle or driver. The child and feline were both fine. The pigeons weren’t his problem and if people didn’t want their fucking traffic lights bent, then they shouldn’t have put them where blind people could hit them in the first place.

All this for minor property damage. Absurd. He felt like he’d paid off half of New York that morning just having the concrete barriers repaired.

Stacy’s wakefulness was the cherry on top of an already abysmal day working from home.

She mumbled something incoherent at first, then screamed and so contributed beautifully to Matt’s growing migraine.

When he went to go retrieve her from where she’d fallen off the couch, he was rewarded with a slap and then having to re-capture and wrestle her away from the door. She struggled against his hold on her neck, but didn’t break it, which was confirmation of what Matt already suspected.

She wasn’t in a position to leave.

“Spiderwoman,” he said over the unnecessary struggling. “Let’s talk about this like—”

“LET GO.”

FFFfffffuck. That was that ear done.

He applied another arm to the situation.

“Stacy,” he said with more authority. “You need to—”

“LET ME GO.”

For fuck’s sake. Everyone just had to do things the hard way, didn’t they? Fine. He dropped her and let her shuffle away from him, breathing hard.

“What did you do to me?” she demanded. “Who’s clothes are these? Where—why am I here?”

Matt stood in front of the door with his arms crossed over his chest and waited until she was done.

“Let me go,” Stacy said, putting her heels to the ground and making sounds as though to stand.

“Stay right where you are,” Matt ordered in Japanese.

It took her by surprise.

“Wh—what?” she said.

Matt tipped his head down.

“Don’t move,” he translated for her.

“Now you’re trying to kill me? Great. Just _great_ , what else could possibly go wrong?” Stacy rasped.

Matt held his jaw firm.

“Why don’t you just do it already?” Stacy snapped at him. “No one would even know. Everyone’s—no one’s—no one would even notice.” Her tone trailed off.

Matt tasted acid.

“Get up,” he said.

Stacy said nothing.

“Get. Up,” Matt ordered. “You’re not a hostage. Get up. You’re not this weak.”

A sniff answered him and he felt his eye twitch.

“Gwendolyn,” he warned.

Stacy didn’t correct him. She always corrected him. She always told him to go take a hike and/or die in a sewer when he used her full name.

Christ.

He was—he was going to have to—

Oh, _come_ on. Here? Now? God, is this a fun joke to you?

He sighed and let his shoulders fall and his crossed arms with them.

“Who is she?” he asked.

The sniffing was cut off by swallowing.

“What did you say?” Stacy asked thickly.

“The Spider. The imposter. Who is she?” Matt asked. “Where did she come from?”

“You called her an imposter.”

Yes, obviously. What else could she be?

“You—you know I’m me?”

Wh—

Yes. That’s what he’d said--WOAH, WOAH, WOAH. HANDS OFF, LADY. No touching, _NO touching_.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Stacy said, pulling her horrible, gangly limbs back to her chest and blessedly _away_ from Matt’s being.

He wanted a bath. He wanted a bath _now_.

“It’s just, no one—my dad didn’t even—she’s just—people think she’s me,” Stacy said quietly. “Everyone thinks she’s me. The news. My friends. Mr. Nelson--everywhere I go, she’s already there. Been there for days now and I—I tried to fight her. I tried to get answers but then she—but then—”

Stacy’s voice cracked again and Matt fought back the urge to go find the linen cupboard and climb into it.

“Then they’re stupid,” he said simply.

Stacy’s heartbeat seemed to skip a beat.

“How did you know it was me?” She asked breathily.

“You fight like a teenager,” Matt said with a sneer. “She fights like Elektra.”

“I—I _what_?”

Matt huffed.

“You fight like a teenager,” he repeated. “Messy. Uncoordinated. Overenthusiastic. You come at your mark like a flapping bat and hope that the wings and the web will scare them enough for the superstrength to do the rest of the work, which, because this city is full of fools and gimmicks, works more often for you than it should. Whoever this person is, is trained.”

There was another silence.

“You…knew me…because I’m a hot mess?” Stacy asked.

That was one way to put it.

“Who even _are_ you?”

“Matt Murdock,” Matt said.

“No. Shut up. Who even _are_ you? How did you find me? I don’t remember going to sleep—oh my god, did you _drug me_?”

“No—”

“Oh my _god_ , you drugged me.”

“Now hang on a minute here—”

“Are you trying to rape—”

“NO,” Matt said firmly with a palm firmly out between them. “No. I’m not trying to rape you. I’m not—no. No. I found you under a car, Gwen Stacy, after that—whatever it is—tried to pick a fight and proved itself to be some kind of funhouse mirror creature.”

“And you brought me back here?” Stacy asked.

“Mm. First to medical attention. Then here. I tried your residence, however the imposter was occupying it.”

He figured from Stacy’s silence that she was staring at him in awe.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because,” he said.

“Bullshit.”

“Kindness,” he tried.

He thought he heard the wet sound of a lip curling.

“Is it so hard to believe?” he asked.

“100%,” Stacy snapped.

“Well, I’ll never.”

“Wait,” Stacy said, shuffling around. “Sammy. I was supposed to watch Sammy yesterday—where is he? Is he hurt? Did she hurt him?”

Matt felt his blood pressure ease, and with it went the tension in his jaw. This was how he knew for sure that Stacy was Spiderwoman. The one, the only.

“She called Samuel a slur,” he said.

Stacy gasped.

“She WHAT?”

Matt couldn’t help but smirk.

“I’ll kill her,” Stacy announced.

Matt could have laughed.

“The damage is already done,” he said. “But not to worry. I’ve successfully convinced him that whoever she is, she is an alligator imposter.”

And yet another silence.

“I’m sorry, I think I passed out in between words there, did you just say an ‘alligator?’”

Yes.

“Right. Just checking.”

No worries.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?”

Christ, no need to shout. Jesus, the whole floor was going to be knocking on his door at this rate.

“I’m losing it. This is a hallucination. It’s gotta be. I just—”

“Lost lot of blood,” Matt said.

Stacy jerked in front of him and then made a horrible noise that Matt recognized from both work and a lifetime spent trying not to make it.

Instinct took over.

Elektra had left him 12 messages, Foggy was on his 17th text, and now Matt was sitting on his couch across from Gwen Stacy who, he was fairly certain, was clutching Lola like her life depended on it.

Fucking _kids_.

Whatever. As long as no one was crying. There was to be no crying in this apartment. None. At all. End of story.

“I don’t know what to do,” Stacy admitted into the dog’s fur. “I can’t go anywhere. It started on Monday. I went to school and came home and Dad was mad at me for doing Spider stuff during school hours.”

Matt curled his fingers until the nails laid against his lips. He leaned a little more forward into his palm.

“I told him that I wasn’t,” Stacy continued, “But he turned on the tv and she was out there in my suit. He told me not to lie to him, he said he heard me come home earlier in the day. I—there are other Spiderpeople who this kind of thing has happened to, though--copycats, I mean. So I thought that she was one of them. I went out to find her, but couldn’t and so I came back but—”

She was already there.

Stacy sighed.

“My room light was on,” she said. “She was on my bed. Dad was downstairs and I—I didn’t want to scare him, so I left. Thought I’d do some more digging and find out what was up and how she knew where I lived, but everywhere I went, people just hid? They wouldn’t talk. They kept saying that they’d already given me what I wanted, and then—”

The imposter had found her.

“You—you’re good at this, you know that?”

Matt didn’t have a response for that. It was straightforward to him.

If he, himself was going to pretend to be, say, another Matt Murdock in one of those other universes, he would do the same thing. First get them out of the way. Break into their house. Get as many of their devices as possible—learn how they chatted. Learn how they spoke. Learn what they wore. Take those things and get the hell out of dodge until they got back home, and while they were confused, he’d go around to all the friends and family listed in the phones and on the accounts and make sure to be seen. He’d make sure to tell someone that he thought that someone was trying to steal his identity and felt anxious about it.

And then, the next day, he’d show up to work early and he’d take their seat at their desk. He’d do their job. He’d make their clients’ days. He’d smile and play humble.

He’d text the people in that phone—ask them out for drinks. They’d go out and have a good time, and that night, just as the other Matt Murdock would try to confront him, he’d do whatever it took to put them down and hide them away so that he could keep grounding himself. When that Murdock inevitably woke up, Matt would be so entrenched in their life that _they_ would be the outsider. They’d be the stalker. All the locks would be changed. All the documents examined. Social security numbers, phone numbers, addresses all memorized so that Matt could read them out like the back of his hand if ever asked.

So long as they had the same face, there would be no trouble and that other Murdock? Well, he’d just have to figure things out, wouldn’t he?

“This person is trying to edge you out,” Matt said firmly.

Stacy sucked in a breath.

“Why does she want to be me?” she asked. “What do _I_ have that she doesn’t?”

Useless second question, better first question.

“Wow, rude much.”

Silence, Spider. Matt was trying to _think_.

Did it matter? That was the real question here. Did it matter what the imposter wanted?

Yes and no. On the one hand, it mattered because the goal would narrow down the possible actions she would take next. On the other hand, it didn’t because she wasn’t going to get it. Because as far as Matt was concerned, if she couldn’t complete steps A through Z to achievement, then the goal was inconsequential. What mattered more was breaking her streak before a chain of given events was set in motion.

So did the goal matter, specifically in this case?

Yes.

Sort of. But only because the field was too wide at the present moment and Matt needed more data before he could arrive at a feasible solution to the problem.

If he didn’t, the imposter would find Stacy and soon enough, she would kill Stacy and then the cards would all be on the table for anyone and everyone in the whole city to see—even the Hand.

The Hand could _not_ see the cards.

Matt was _not_ going back to Japan.

He dropped his hand from his face. His phone hummed with vibrations in his pocket.

“Let me be clear, Gwen Stacy,” he said slowly, so that she understood the gravity of what he was about to do. “You serve a specific purpose to me, and what is going to happen next revolves entirely around my commitment to that purpose. Not to you. Do you understand?”

“You’ll help me?” Stacy asked quietly.

Matt said nothing.

“I--I don’t have a choice,” Stacy pointed out. “This is my life we’re talking about, Murdock. It’s not one of your sick games. She could kill my father. She could kill me—everyone who I love. So just--what do you want from me? Just tell me what you want.”

Matt waited.

And waited. The girl’s breathing was quickening. Realization was setting in. It would only be a matter of time until--

“I understand,” she said.

His lips started to curl.

“What is the purpose that I serve for you?” Stacy asked.

Matt straightened his spine and huffed.

“This is not an exchange, Ms. Stacy,” he explained carefully. “Or a deal. This is a service. From me to you. It benefits me, yes, but right now, at this moment, it benefits you to a greater degree, as you have so beautifully laid out. This person, whoever they are, desires to replace you—not as Gwen Stacy, I suspect, at least not right now, but as Spiderwoman. Gwen Stacy will come with time, once she has established herself. Who knows what she wants from there, but it doesn’t matter because she has failed to do that which makes a good impersonator into a _great_ one.”

Stacy’s heartbeat sped up.

“Which is?” she said.

“Her homework,” Matt said dangerously.


	5. bishop to table

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh hell no, was that—
> 
> Did he think—
> 
> Uh-uh. Nope. Nice try, Spiderman. Jonah wasn’t falling for—
> 
> “BOSS, MOVE.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops!
> 
> Have some Jameson. I never thought I'd write him, but here he is for all of your viewing pleasure. Just a note that I'll be noting which pov we're in at the start of each chapter since I'm juggling three verses here.
> 
> So! 
> 
> POV John Jonah Jameson. 'Peter Parker' in this chapter and the next chapter refers to Peter B. Parker (NOT BLONDIE. THIS IS NOT BLONDIE please stop commenting this thank you)

There was noise in the hallway, which Jonah chocked up to Alex giving the new batch of interns a tour of the place.

He translated the sound as one of an impending introduction that he was not interested in being present for and started to gather his folder and tablet for a speedy getaway into the conference room where that purple bastard Barney Bushkin from _The Daily Globe_ was supposed to be waiting for him.

Jonah personally thought that whatever it was he wanted to say could be better communicated through his board of attorneys, but Bushkin was what people in the field referred to as ‘an aggravating piece of shit.’ He would never be satisfied with merely obeying a Cease and Desist order. It had to be a whole goddamn ordeal so that he could save face in front of all his sniveling employees.

At least Jonah’s sniveling employees would admit when they were wrong. Some of them (Ellison) over their dead bodies, but they all got there eventually.

The noise, however, did not dissipate, even as Jonah flicked off his office lights.

He hung in the doorway and frowned.

What that sound getting louder?

Someone screamed his name and he turned left and found a well-lit hallway. It was a very familiar hallway. He’d had it painted that horrible color to discourage his staff from standing around in it. But this time the ear-searing whiteness was punctuated by something blurry.

Kind of red?

Oh.

Very red.

Oh _hell_ no, was that—

Did he think—

Uh-uh. Nope. Nice try, Spiderman. Jonah wasn’t falling for—

“BOSS, MOVE.”

The action registered before the voice did and Jonah’s back hit the door frame so hard his head knocked against it.

And then there was a body in front of him.

It was shouting.

And Spiderman, no longer a blur, but a towering red and blue jaguar stood on his hind legs, snarled at it. His clawed red hands latched around the throat of the shouter and the victim’s own hands caught onto them and dug themselves into the suit, tendons flexing, the bones of the knuckles nearly visible through the skin.

Parker.

What in god’s name—

“You’re finished, you’re finished, you’re _finished_ ,” Spiderman hissed as his fingers dragged gasps out of Parker’s lips.

He couldn’t get enough air to respond.

Jonah’s own breath caught, and then stuttered with panic.

He had to do something. He had to. His employee was going to die. His employee was going to—

Parker went limp. His shoulders drooped in front of Jonah and slowly, his hands fell like a defeated boxer’s. They tumbled and dropped, and then swung open at his sides. And Jonah felt.

Nothing.

He felt nothing.

Numbness.

Silence.

Spiderman’s shoulders loosened and then, like it was a relief, his grip on Parker did, too. He dropped him. Right to the floor. Like Peter Parker, who had walked into this building at sixteen years old and laid the next twenty at Jonah’s feet, was grease to be slopped off the griddle and lazily poured down a drain when the restaurant manager wasn’t looking.

The sound of Parker’s knees hitting the eye-searing linoleum suddenly made Jonah realize how white it really was. How cold.

No one should have to suffer on a floor that looked like a dinner plate.

It was cruelty.

It was cannibalism.

He looked up to Spiderman and Spiderman seemed to finally realize where he was and who he was stood in front of.

“JJ,” he drawled, no doubt with a huge, smacking smile under that sickening mask of his. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Jonah studied him as the hollowness spread through his chest, creeping up and out to curl its expanding fingers into his shoulders.

“Don’t mind the mess,” Spiderman said. “Here, I’ll—”

“Leave. Him,” Jonah said before he realized his lips were moving. “You fucking _coward_.”

There was a long pause.

Parker was not dead. Jonah knew what the dead looked like. But he did not move and Jonah had seen enough.

“I—you don’t understand, sir,” Spiderman said, “He’s—he’s trying to ruin me, Mr. Jameson. He’s undermining everything you and I have ever worked for. He’s—”

So this was about Peter Parker was it?

About a few less-than-flattering pictures published online?

About a brilliant artist trying to make the best of a shit situation that was, in fact, caused by the very man who’d walked in here and choked him to senselessness on the threshold of Jonah’s very office?

“Here’s what is going to happen,” Jonah said as calmly as fire found oxygen in the hollow space spreading throughout his veins, “You, you piece of vigilante trash, are going to do what you do best and call the fucking emergency services before _I_ take this moment, right here, right now to join your ranks as Frank fucking Castle himself. Have I made myself clear?”

There was a pause.

“No.”

What?

“No,” Spiderman repeated. And then giggled. Like this was some kind of joke.

The fire went out. Blown into nothingness like a birthday candle.

“I was right about you,” Jonah whispered as the thought curled around his mind. “I was right the whole time.”

“Maybe,” Spiderman said with a cutesy shrug.

You fucking slug. You fucking scum of the earth. You piece of—

Spiderman vanished. It like he’d slipped backwards. Those huge mask eyes of his shot wider than Jonah had ever seen them as he fell back in slow motion.

His shoulders hit the ground. Then his head hit the ground.

And then his head hit the ground again, but it didn’t connect a third time—or maybe it did, Jonah didn’t see it, though. His view of the bastard was obscured by blue flannel striped with thin lines of white.

Shoulders. Broad. Broader than Jonah had ever considered them to be before.

Parker’s elbow came up and his knuckles—those white knuckles, came down right into Spiderman’s jaw. Someone cried out in anger. Jonah didn’t know who it was. Everything seemed to have become muffled as he watched Peter Parker, sixteen years old, Peter Parker, twenty-five years old, Peter Parker, thirty years old seemingly just last year, beat the ever-loving shit out of Spiderman in an honest-to-god doorway.

Things only regained normal speed again when Parker tore himself away from Spiderman. He stood and his knees straightened; one cracked loudly as those impossibly broad shoulders rose and dropped with each pant.

Jonah raised his hand to his heart.

“Boss,” Parker said, hoarse as any man who’d just been near-strangled would be, “Tell everyone to get out of the building.” He gasped between these words that Jonah was hearing but which failed to match Parker’s, well, everything. “They need to get out. He wants me and only me. But he’ll go through whoever he has to, to—”

“What the _hell_ are you talking about, boy?” Jonah snapped. “Sit down, you’re suffocating—”

“No, listen to me, Mr. J,” Parker wheezed. “ _Listen,_ he’s gonna wake up and—”

No. No. No, no, no. Peter was—he was off-balance. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Someone had to call an ambulance or—

“Mr. Jameson, I’m begging you.”

And looking up into Parker’s eyes, Jonah found that he was.

He looked so much like his father. Like his uncle. Good people. People who didn’t deserve to have died the way they did. May Parker didn’t deserve cancer. Peter shouldn’t have been alone in that room with her, holding her hand as she finally slipped away.

Parker couldn’t lie.

Not then. Not now.

“Peter, son, you’re hurt,” Jonah said. “Sit down. I’ll—Alex? ALEX. Call the police there’s been an incident—”

He was cut off by an inhuman sound. A roar of fury.

Parker broke their gaze and seemed to rip his body away so fast that it was as if he’d glitched three seconds into the future.

Spiderman’s palm hit the linoleum with a wet slap as he pushed the rest of his torso up.

“This is getting old, friend,” he rumbled.

Parker’s spine bowed.

“Tell me about it, stud,” he said.

His long fingers curled into fists.

Jonah felt his heart freeze for the second time in five minutes.

Parker was going to fight? He wanted to fight _more_? Why? How? This was Spiderman. This was a man who could lift a gas tanker. Who could hold together two speeding trains. What kind of PCP had Parker snorted on his way down that hallway that made him think that he, of all people, was going to take down the most famous masked vigilante the city had known for a century?

“No,” he abruptly decided. “No. I don’t know what April’s Fool’s Day joke this is, Peter, but I’m not having it. Either of you. If you want to die, take it out of this—”

It seemed like today was a day of unfinished thoughts.

This one was cut short by Spiderman launching himself at Parker and Parker’s back sliding through the air just past Jonah to land hard on the ground inside Jonah’s office.

Parker hated Jonah’s office. Despised it. Had dawdled outside it as a boy, then as a man, even when the only thing Jonah had to give him was a goddamn pay raise.

And so the moment that Parker’s lanky, perpetually slouching back hit that carpet, Jonah’s body finally re-found its footing in reality.

Peter wasn’t playing a game.

Peter wasn’t part of some kind of elaborate joke. Some hilarious Spidey Vs. Spiderman Papparazzi event that the managers on the floor below couldn’t wrangle into submission among the assistant editors. No.

No, this was real.

Parker shouted out as Spiderman slammed a foot into his side with force. Spidey scoffed and then barked when Parker threw his body into a tight curl around the leg before it could be retracted. Spidey grunted. Parker refused to let go, which made Spidey have to bend down to try to extricate him.

Jonah saw his moment and lurched past the both of them for the phone on the desk. He snatched it up and dialed 9-1-1.

“Hello, 9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”

Oh, you know. Just the usual.

“Spiderman is trying to kill one of my employees,” Jonah decided to go with. “My name is John Jameson. This is _The Bugle_ and that bastard just choked out one of my photographers in the goddamn hallway.”

There was a pause that was punctuated by Parker yelping as Spiderman punched him in the ribs.

“Mr. Jameson, is anyone else in the building injured?” the voice on the other side of the line asked.

That wasn’t super clear, although from all the squeaking and shouting outside the office now, Jonah was starting to get the feeling that Parker hadn’t exactly come up here on his own volition. There were six floors between the digital media lab and Jonah’s office, and that meant that—

“ALEX,” Jonah roared, “Is anyone hurt downstairs?”

Spidey told Parker that with an attitude like his, it was shocking that he hadn’t gone into supervillainy and called himself ‘The Leech.’ Parker opted to bite the shit out of Spidey’s shin.

Alex’s trembling voice called from outside that windows were broken and everyone had taken cover.

Jonah relayed this information to the dispatcher while she asked him for the same information over and over.

“Come on, now,” Jonah heard Spidey say in his direction. “Everyone’s _fine_ , Bossman. I don’t kill people, remember? Sheesh, it’s like, my whole—fucking—deal.”

Parker didn’t budge between the blows, although Jonah could hear the sound of air rushing out of his lung with each impact.

“Lady, this man is assaulting my employee, I need someone here _now_ ,” he spat into the phone.

“Help is on its way, sir,” the dispatcher said. “Can you try talking to Spidey?”

Talking to him?

Oh, sure, yeah, Jonah was just going to have a chat with the man who was wreaking chaos on what Jonah was rapidly coming to understand was the entire goddamn building.

He didn’t _feel_ like it, Ms. Dispatch.

“Spidey,” he shouted. “Get off him. What’re your demands, already?”

“I don’t. Have. Demands,” Spiderman said. “I just. Want. This guy. To _drown already_.”

“Fuck off,” Parker snarled.

“Sure thing, pal, right after you,” Spidey said. Then he froze and turned towards Jonah with huge white eyes.

It was like he’d had an idea. Jonah hated it. He held the phone out in front of him.

“You’re minutes from arrest,” he warned.

“Am I?” Spidey asked.

Parker seemed to sense whatever it was Spidey was thinking because he abandoned Spidey’s legs and tackled him from behind.

Jonah watched both men go down and he had to say, Peter was really holding his own here.

Huh. He had said that he’d taken some wrestling classes a while ago, hadn’t he?

“Touch him and we’re gonna have problems,” Parker threatened.

“I got bad news for you,” Spidey spat into the carpet, “We already got problems.”

The sound of a helicopter drew both men’s attention away from each other and towards the window behind Jonah’s desk. A police speaker ordered Spidey to freeze and put his hands up in the air.

Spiderman went completely still under Parker and Parker scrambled to get his arms into a nelson, but then stopped.

“No,” he said.

Spiderman’s mask jerked his way.

“I’m sorry it had to end like this,” he said suddenly. “But you’re ruining my street cred and it’s all I’ve got.”

“Don’t do this,” Parker pleaded. “Just tell me what you want. Don’t do this. DON’T—”

But it was too late.

Spidey had already sent him flying right into the window.

Time slowed down as Parker connected with the glass. It was reinforced. It shattered like it was supposed to. But then it shattered beyond that with the superhuman force Spidey put into his throw.

It broke like thin ice on a lake.

Like a mirror dropped from a second story.

A clock face in an old war that no one remembered.

Jonah’s hands reached out helplessly.

But it was too late.

Peter was gone.

Ten stories.

A whole family.

Jonah had witnessed each of their deaths. They’d all gone slowly. Had given the others just enough time to start healing before the next one took their final bow.

A lifetime ago, Jonah had written an article about the ‘power-couple’ Parkers, genius scientists who’d found each other by hard work and a little dash of fate.

Their obituaries had left behind a child.

Jonah knew Ben from highschool. It was silly, but back then highschool had meant something. People you met there were part of your community. They stayed friends, even when ‘friend’ came to mean something more like ‘I once knew his sweater; his seat in our classroom.’

Ben Parker’s brother died, and then he did, too. Horribly.

That left baby Parker with no father figures. Fifteen years old. He was fifteen and change when he’d gathered the courage to set pictures he’d taken himself on Jonah’s desk, but he’d still been too green and anxious to talk them up. He was also too young to hire without a permit. Jonah had printed out the form for him and told him to get his aunt to sign it.

And now?

Gone. In an instant.

Christ. On the boy’s headstone would be ‘Peter Parker, poor kid never caught a break or had a chance.’ And Jonah wouldn’t leave flowers for him, he’d leave stones.

That is, if there was even enough of a body left to bury.

As the police helicopter chased after Spiderman, Jonah crept to the window. He went down on hands and knees, horrified to look, but needing the closure of checking.

He poked his head through the space where glass had once been and looked down.

Traffic carried on in the street below. A crowd had gathered around the building, but Jonah had to frown.

There was no sign of any bodies laying out down there.

That—

Wait.

Where was Parker? Had he gotten caught on something in the descent? Had he somehow—miraculously, been caught by the helicopter?

He squinted, surveying the ground. Surely, Peter had landed somewhere. Unless Spiderman had taken him with him. Maybe snatched him out of thin air? It wasn’t impossible, especially given Spidey’s evident feud with Parker and Parker specifically.

But then he stopped.

All thoughts did, too.

If he could make his neck move, he would have done a double take, but as it was, he couldn’t move and he didn’t need to.

There. Tucked down directly in front of him, was Peter Benjamin Parker.

His hands were flat against the building wall. His whole body pressed in so close to it that he looked almost like a shadow.

His brown hair tossed wildly down there.

He wasn’t screaming. He wasn’t afraid.

There was no window sill for him to stand on. No fire escape to take his weight. His fingers weren’t crammed into some seam in the concrete.

Jonah’s heart stuttered. Parker’s face lifted.

They made eye contact.


	6. bishop to alley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jumping spider, confirmed.  
> Bug spray, desperately needed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still chillin' in POV Jameson
> 
> God, he's a turd, I love him.

Jonah experienced a few flashes of romantic thought.

One of them looked like throttling Peter Parker on the floor of his office. Another looked like digging up a picture of Ben Parker to put on the computer monitor as he held the man captive for answers to questions he was sure he could come up with if given a few minutes and a shot of scotch.

Somewhere in there was a little spark of hope, even, that this was all just one great big misunderstanding and that Parker, while maybe an enhanced person or a mutant or something, had become aware of this fact exactly as Jonah himself did.

But he didn’t exactly have the time to indulge in such fantasies.

Oh, he prepared himself to. He even, despite his better judgement, started to reach a hand down to Parker through the remains of the window, but true to goddamn form, Parker’s head snapped up and his pupils went to pinpricks and then he _launched himself_ into Jonah’s face.

Jumping spider, confirmed.

Bug spray, desperately needed.

Jonah spent a good five seconds of staring up at Parker’s chin while someone outside started shouting in a tinny roar. It took two of those seconds for him to process the fact that it was, in fact, the police helicopter.

“What in god’s fucking name are you do—” he started to say before Parker seized his arm and tore his back from the ground like Jonah was a piece of Styrofoam.

What happened next Jonah elected to block out for the rest of his life. He reclassified it as ‘movement of a violent variety,’ and it involved being suddenly manhandled and then _lifted off the ground_ and bounced around like a ping-pong ball while Parker, no longer bothering to conceal what he’d been hiding for the last twenty years of his and Jonah’s acquaintance, turned the right-hand stairwell to Jonah’s office into a giant pin-ball machine for people.

And once that downward journey to hell had finally come to an end, daylight broke again. Parker dropped him back to his feet for the negligible amount of time it took for him to get a grip on Jonah’s arm. The grip brought back fond moments of that one time in highschool woodshop where Jonah had, perhaps fatefully, allowed Ben Parker’s friend Allen to put his forearm in an adjustable vice clamp.

The only difference between that moment to this was that Peter Parker’s fingers were _huge_ and when they touched the fabric of Jonah’s jacket, that was it for both of them. It was like he had some kind of super-velcro on his fingers. They were latched together forever now, vice-grip or no vice-grip.

At this point, Jonah legitimately started to contemplate his last words.

He did not miss the fact that, while all this was going on, the helicopter overhead had taken the opportunity to implode on itself.

It didn’t actually fall to pieces, but the sirens and the loudspeaker started to jitter and wail and it cut itself off while the chopper shuddered around in the sky up there.

“You can’t see me, I’m a ghost. You can’t see me. I’m a ghost. Be a ghost. Be a ghost. C _ome on, Parker_ , be a ghost.”

It took Jonah a moment after working through the terror of what was happening to him to realize that Parker was talking to himself.

He did not look back, and once Jonah did, he understood why. He felt all of the color abandon his body.

He could see the top of _The Bugle_ ’s building from there; the huge glass window of his office gaped empty into the sky. A little red dot swung back into it, having used the helicopter’s base as a grounding point for a line of web.

Jonah didn’t need to see that body up close to know that it turned around and looked back out over the skyline.

Thinking.

Plotting.

Furious.

“That man wants to kill me,” he realized out loud.

“You and me both, pal.”

He startled and realized that he and Parker had stopped moving. They were standing in an alley that was humid with the vents of building boilers in every direction. It reeked of old vomit. Parker’s fingers stayed latched around Jonah’s wrist as he moved his face back and forth frantically like a dancing fishing lure. He was searching the top of the buildings.

Jonah tried to twist his arms out of Parker’s grip, but the man didn’t even seem to notice the effort.

“What’s going on?” Jonah demanded. “Tell me what the hell is going on, and unhand me, you—”

“JJ,” Parker snapped, finally turning around and meeting Jonah’s eye, “For once in your life I need you to just shut the fuck up and trust me.”

Words died on Jonah’s tongue.

This was not the meek, humble boy that he’d let into the office behind them all those years ago.

This was—

This was—

“Spidey!!”

“Oh, thank _Jesus_ ,” Parker breathed.

A body scrambled out from behind the top of one of the buildings overhead. It started to make a rapid descent. Parker moved back and took Jonah with him.

“I’m alright,” he called to the body.

The person’s feet hit the alley floor. They stood up and unfurled their limbs and revealed themself to be a young man.

Jonah knew him. The Black Suit. Brooklyn Spidey. He looked much sleeker from further away and at night. Here in the daytime, his look was marred by the bright red that covered his shoulders and dripped down to his elbows in two athletic-looking lines.

Oh, the backpack did a number on him, too. Jonah couldn’t forget that.

“I came as soon as I heard,” Brooklyn panted. “What the hell was that?”

A great question, actually. Jonah gave him an 8 out of 10 for it.

“Mr. Terminator couldn’t wait any longer,” Parker said. “Man came straight through the lab window and chased my ass up six stories. Didn’t even spare the coffee machine, Doc. Can you believe?”

There was a long pause.

“Old man,” Brooklyn said suddenly, “I need you to think about _anything_ other than stimulants right now. For example, the man trying to _murder you_.”

“And my boss,” Parker added in a huff.

Brooklyn’s mask eyes widened and slowly, he noticed Jonah standing there. The sudden giddiness at this whole situation was so overwhelming that Jonah had to resist the urge to wave.

“WHAT THE FUCK, PETER?”

Aha! Look, a young man with sense. Jonah was upgrading this one to a 10 out of 10.

“Why didn’t you call me? You’re supposed to call me, remember?” Brooklyn emphasized with his hands.

“You were at school, kid, and I handled it,” Parker said. “Anyways, we got bigger problems, we’ve gotta—”

“Dude, my school is _right there_. Do you see where I’m pointing? Or did you misplace your bifocals again— _Spidey, listen to me_ —”

“—get somewhere away from all this and regroup. Letting him burn himself out isn’t working—”

Brooklyn grabbed at his face as though checking to make sure that he was still real and solid.

“Am I in camo-mode right now, or are you just talkin’ over me like a dick?” he asked.

There was a pause.

“I’m always a—” Parker started.

“It was _rhetorical_.”

Jonah cleared his throat and got a whole glance from each body before him for his trouble. He felt his blood pressure spike.

“Parker, I demand an ex—” he started.

“Underoos,” A new voice interrupted. “Why didn’t you call?”

Jonah knew that voice. He didn’t know where he knew it from until he looked over his shoulder and found a man in a suit slipping smoothly out from the cramped space between a gray and blue building. His suit was immaculate. His red hair was almost florescent in the dinginess of the surrounding space.

Matthew Murdock, attorney at law.

He’d taken down Fisk. He’d put away fourteen HYDRA officers. He’d served as ADA for his buddy Franklin Nelson, who’d taken up the DA position in a moment of hubris. And he walked like the devil, with that white stick of his barely scraping the ground, held almost daintily above it in his left hand.

“I didn’t exactly have time, y’all,” Parker said.

“Not that kind of call,” Murdock said.

Brooklyn’s posture spoke of confusion, which Jonah was glad for because it meant that he wasn’t the only one.

“Not important, Red,” Parker said. “I need a distraction. I got a bad feelin’ about this one. Need time to think.”

“Consider it done,” Murdock crooned. “What is he?”

‘What?’ this man asked. ‘ _What_?’ Oh, no. No, no. Jonah was too old for more aliens. He’d already done two rounds of aliens.

“Unclear,” Parker said.

Murdock practically purred.

“I love ‘unclear,’” he said.

Brooklyn’s face twisted his way in silent horror.

“You know what I hate?” the kid piped up. “Besides you two?”

“Save it,” Parker said. “Bigger problems. I need info.”

“It’s ‘situations unclear,’” Brooklyn said.

“What kind of problems?” Murdock asked over him.

“Hello? Hello, seniors? I know y’all are mutually aging and increasingly hard of hearing but I’m _right here_ ,” Brooklyn interjected.

“Anything you can get,” Parker said to Murdock. “Preferably some of his tech. It ain’t the same as mine, but it’s close.”

“Copy that,” Murdock said. “Kid, are you comin’?”

Brooklyn was gaping under that mask.

“Uuuuuuuuh, no,” he said lightheartedly, “No, actually, see I just baled outta class and I really oughta be— _obviously I’m coming_.”

“No, Doc, I got a job for you,” Parker cut him off.

Brooklyn turned his way with question marks just about floating over his head.

“A job?” he asked. “Are we not all goin’ to ‘rah, rah, rag on the imposter’ together?”

Sorry, the what now?

“That’s a negative,” Parker said. “We need data first and we need him to stay right where he is; he’s gotten in deep enough already. I’ve got a plan for that, but I need this guy under 24/7 defense.”

Jonah blinked and realized abruptly that ‘this guy’ was, in fact, himself.

“You’re puttin’ me on defend?” Brooklyn asked.

There was a pause.

“The alternative is goin’ and gettin’ the stuffin’ kicked outta you by The Bombastic Shitcan over there, so--?” Parker offered.

This statement was followed by yet another thoughtful pause.

Brooklyn’s mask rounded on Jonah.

Jonah felt a little used, he wasn’t going to lie.

“Don’t feel bad, he does this to MJ all the time,” Brooklyn (Doc? Had Parker called him ‘Doc?’) said.

“You and all your ilk are the bane of my existence,” Jonah told him stiffly. “I’d like to be taken to a police station now.”

Doc had the grace to look sheepish in the shoulders.

“Listen, man, I would absolutely do that,” he said. “But Spidey’s using words with me today, so at this point, I’m thinkin’ that it’s way safer for you to be stuck with me than anywhere Mr. America Flag back there can see you.”

Wh—

Why the hell didn’t these people just use Spiderman’s name? And ‘using words???’ What did that even mean? Parker was very capable of using words. His emails were notoriously direct and then when people met him, they often thought the office had sent the wrong photographer.

But more importantly than that—

“Parker’s Spiderman,” Jonah said.

Doc made his suit eyes blink at him.

“Oh shit,” he realized. “You didn’t know. You’re the bossman, aren’t you?”

How flattering.

“Yeesh. No wonder he’s on edge.”

Jonah didn’t get it and no longer cared. He just wanted answers.

“He’s Spiderman,” he said. “He’s been Spiderman for twenty goddamn years and I let him carry on being Spiderman right under my nose in my own company.”

Doc cocked his head and didn’t slow his pace. It was much less urgent than Parker’s had been; his grip wasn’t as punishing either, even though Jonah still felt like he was being dragged around in handcuffs.

“I mean, yeah, man. You did that,” Doc said.

Infuriating.

“I’m going to give him a raise and then fire him,” Jonah decided. “That’ll do it.”

Doc snorted.

“I think he’d understand,” he said. “He’s been trying to keep that other guy away from your building for the last week, but I think we all knew it wasn’t going to work.”

Jonah stopped walking. Doc didn’t, however, and so Jonah found himself having a wee drag until he caught his step again.

“He was doing what?” he asked. “For how long?”

Doc glanced over his shoulder.

“Spidey always guards _The Bugle_ ,” he said. “Pretty much everyone knows that he’s got a defend order out on the place. It’s why people don’t fuck with your office—haven’t you ever wondered why _The Globe_ and _The Bulletin_ get their shit demolished in every other turf war and y’all scrape by unnoticed? It ain’t because you’re not noticed, I’ll tell you that.”

He—they—Parker did what now?

“What’s your name, anyways? Spidey only calls you the ‘bossman.’”

Jonah’s mouth was suddenly dry.

“J-Jameson,” he said. “John Jonah Jameson.”

Doc processed this information and then carried on with his mission.

“Mr. Jameson, then,” he said. “Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, anyways. Word down below has it that if you touch _The Bugle_ , then you’re asking for the whole of Spidey to get up in your face and make your life a livin’ hell until he’s decided you’ve suffered enough for your sins. Rumor has it that someone took their chances once and once only. Spidey’s never said anything to me about the place specifically, but you know, he barely ever says anything to me to start with, so that doesn’t mean a whole lot.”

So Parker had been protecting _The Bugle_. Protecting it. As Spiderman. What kind of self-flagellation exercise was that?

“Wh—why _The Bugle_?” Jonah asked. “Why did he choose _The Bugle_?”

Doc shrugged and ducked under a line of drying clothing. Jonah followed suit.

“I dunno,” Doc admitted. “I think he likes it there. Keeps him humble or something. Not that he ain’t petty—remember the Jell-o a while back? Yeah, that was him. I helped.”

Jonah found that he somehow wasn’t even angry. He was shocked.

“Parker does all the Spiderman stories,” he murmured.

“Yeah, he stages the pictures himself,” Doc said. “It’s pretty wild, actually. A whole production and everything. I think when people see him out doing it, they think he’s some kind of hardcore cosplayer.”

Good. Lord.

“I’ve seen them, you know,” Doc said. “He doesn’t talk about his work or anything, but I’ve seen the pictures. His other ones, too--the ones on his website. He’s kind of like, _super_ talented, you know?”

Yes. Yes, Jonah knew. He’d seen it taking shape from the beginning. From the very beginning.

“You wouldn’t know it,” Doc said. “He’s so quiet.”

Quiet? What was this bullshit with the quiet?

Parker was a smart-aleck. An endless stream of commentary. He talked to himself when there was no one around for him to talk to. Now, Jonah was kicking himself for not ever having put that stream of nonsense together with Spidey’s notorious motormouth.

And yet this kid kept harping on this ‘quiet’ bullshit.

“He doesn’t talk to you?” Jonah asked.

Doc sighed.

“He does more now,” he said. “But for the first few months I knew him, he didn’t say jack. Not a single word.”

Jonah wanted to stop again, but he knew by now that Doc would just carry on with him, whether Jonah wanted to go or not, so he refrained.

“Why would he do that?” he asked himself more than the kid.

And finally, the young man stopped.

“I went to _The Bugle_ to confront him,” he said, “When I decided that I needed to meet Spiderman, I mean. I thought I’d go for the guy who took all his pictures, since clearly they had some kind of relationship. But I didn’t recognize him as who he was, even when our, uh, sixth-sense, you might call it, told me it was him. And I think it fucked him up pretty bad, because we’re it, you know. Just the two of us in this whole universe who share this mutation.”

That sounded lonely.

Jonah didn’t know why that word fit in between Doc’s own so snugly.

“He told me later that after I blew him off, he told his whole office that he was Spiderman. Admitted it to everyone, and they all just laughed at him.”

The memory unfurled like a peony in spring.

Jonah could feel the pinch of new shoes; he remembered taking his happy ass down to the media lab in a fit of rage, trying to dispel an itch of violence through something tangible and productive. He’d ordered a picture of Spiderman from the lab at large since he was told that all of the artists tended to keep a few images saved onto their hard-drives for moments like this. And out of the blue, Parker had stood up. He’d claimed to be the ‘masked-menace’ that Jonah was demanding photographs of.

Jonah remembered now; he’d laughed. The whole room had broken into giggles. Parker had such a dry sense of humor. It wouldn’t have been out of character for him to lurch up from his seat and announce that he was joining the Rockettes.

That moment had just seemed to be an extension of that.

But now Jonah could see the sting.

It was a coming out, in a way. And then immediately, Parker had been shot down. It should have been a testament to his disguise, and yet Parker had internalized it as a Silencing.

Jonah had never thought about what it might be like for someone who really was something special to receive that kind of reaction.

“So he stopped talking to you,” he said.

“In the mask? No, he never spoke to begin with,” Doc said. “He still doesn’t, not much. He saves it for out of the mask. Turns it on for bad guys and kids who really need it. So when he came tearing out today with you, giving orders and the like, I guess I knew right off the bat that you were someone important to him.”

Someone…important.

“Mr. Jameson?”

He shook himself. Doc had stopped a block away front of a train station.

“Do you have a Metro card?” he asked.

Doc was a slim, young African-American man with close cropped hair. On the right side of his head, he had two lines shaved into his fade. His nose was broad and his eyes were dark and he hefted that backpack of his over his left shoulder.

He didn’t give anything away when he stepped out of the alley in street clothes. His name, his age, his everything—it was like none of it mattered to him, and yet Jonah still felt somehow like he’d been given a dressing-down.

‘Say nothing, tell no one,’ Doc’s silence impressed upon him.

Jonah could only imagine that he’d learned that little gig from Peter ‘Talk Until Everyone’s Stopped Listening’ Parker.

“Can you tell me what’s going on?” Jonah asked after about two minutes on the half-empty day train. It had been years since he’d taken one later than ten or earlier than seven. He left the day trawling to the young folks and interns.

“I could,” Doc said. “But I think MJ’ll explain it better.”

Mary Jane Watson. She’d kept her name in both the marriage and the divorce. She worked for that bastard Bushkin. People in the office joked that Parker had married the enemy, but Jonah knew better. Parker hadn’t married the enemy; he’d married the neighbor. Those two had been lovesick pups since they were teens. Jonah wondered how long she’d known about the wall-crawling.

Perhaps that had been the unspoken third party in her and Parker’s earlier divorce.

“I’m not sure that I’ll be ‘safer’ in the company of Mary Jane Watson than in my own home,” Jonah pointed out to Doc.

Doc gave him a cool look, then lifted the heavy-looking set of headphones from around his neck up onto his ears.

“Say what you want, Bossman,” he said. “But you’ve never seen what Mrs. Watson can do with a bat.”

Beg your pardon?

Mary Jane opened the door like a woman in a horror movie. She peeked through the crack with shame all over her face.

“Mr. Jameson,” she greeted.

Jonah stared her down.

“Mrs. Watson,” he said.

“Miles, hon, you don’t have to stick around, we’ve got this from here,” Mary Jane told Doc, apparently neé Miles.

“Spidey’ll murder me and set eagles on my corpse if I leave you now,” Miles deadpanned.

Mary Jane flinched.

“He wouldn’t,” she said.

Miles blinked slowly at her.

“Pretend I’m not here,” he said before returning to his laptop and what Jonah now saw was a collection of sociology textbooks. “Look at me, I’m Egg.”

“You’re not Egg,” Mary Jane said.

“I could be,” Miles hummed.

Jonah almost didn’t want to know.

Almost.

“The cat,” Mary Jane told him once her and Parker’s table had been cleared of what could only be described as a _thousand_ tiny pieces of metal carefully arranged in a rectangle on a white cloth. Mary Jane swept the whole thing up and dumped it on the bed in the room down the hall. Jonah’s brain supplied an image of Parker holding his head in mid-scream at the gesture.

It felt good.

“You have a cat now,” he said. “And no baby shower? How unlike you two.”

Mary Jane winced.

“Mr. Jameson,” she said. “I realize that you’re probably feeling a lot of complex emotions right now.”

No, no. Not complex. Doctor Miles over there had cured him of that. Mostly anger now. Yeah. Mostly anger.

“Peter trusts you like he trusts no one else, I’m sure that you know that,” Mary Jane said.

This was placating nonsense, but okay sure. Jonah would bite.

“Mrs. Watson,” he said calmly. “I would just like the truth of the current situation.”

There was a long pause.

“The truth?” Mary Jane said an octave higher than anyone about to tell it would.

“Just the truth,” Jonah repeated.

“He doesn’t know about the double,” Doctor Miles said from the couch. He paused and reconsidered. “He _sorta_ knows about the double,” he amended.

Jonah hated that he’d started to like this kid.

“Oh, geez. Oh, man. Okay,” Mary Jane said. “Alright. I can do this.”

Jonah sure hoped so.

“So it’s like this,” Mary Jane said. “Someone is trying to kill my husband.”

Nevermind, Jonah wanted his ignorance back.

Ten days ago, Parker and his darling wife had come to the realization that he’d either acquired the powers of cloning and teleportation or had a copycat running around.

Parker was not surprised by either of these options this because apparently, at some point in the poor schmuck’s life, he’d actually encountered clones of himself.

Mary Jane said that he thought they were ‘very well-meaning.’

Peter truly had lived through it all.

Regardless, because of the aforementioned past clone situation, Parker was not alarmed when he found himself both at home and on live news at the same time that fateful evening. Instead, he heaved a sigh and said that he thought that one of his clone-friends had gotten wrapped up in symbiote business (read: _alien business_ ) again, and had gone out to go mediate whatever dual-disaster that was.

Except that when he’d gotten to where he needed to be, he was completely ignored, which, according to Mary Jane, was not typical Parker-clone behavior.

Cue to the next day and a very confused Parker going to work and finding said clone-not-clone sitting at his desk like he belonged there.

Jonah couldn’t believe that this other man had made it through security, and, Mary Jane said, neither could Parker. Not to mention that Parker apparently really did have some kind of warning bat-signal out on _The Bugle_ , and he was furious to have had that understanding broken by this other person.

He disposed of them.

Mary Jane did not wish to explain how, but Doctor Miles helpfully supplied Jonah with the image of a man being lobbed out from a 4th-story window right into the garbage cans at the back of the building.

Jonah didn’t want to say that he was proud, but he was a little bit proud.

Parker went back to work, and the Interloper had decided that whatever ruse that had been wasn’t going to work out for him. So he’d moved on to plan B.

Plan B looked like out-spidering Spiderman.

He worked non-stop for the next seven days, night and day, catching and stopping crime, smearing his face all over the media, reminding the city of just how capable their darling, people-pleasing vigilante was.

Except there was one problem. Among those in the know, Spiderman was notoriously jaded as fuck.

Pretty much every super, villain, and two-bit vigilante knew that he’d been in some kind of domestic dispute over the last year and they’d all more or less cleared off out of some kind of twisted, bizarre respect ritual that Jonah hadn’t imagined they were capable of enacting. These days, they tended to leave Parker to his devices and instead spent their energy making his protégé’s life difficult.

Doctor Miles saluted at this note without turning around on the couch.

“Why does everyone call him Doc?” Jonah asked Mary Jane in a whisper hidden behind a hand.

“Oh, he reminds Peter of Bones from Star Trek,” Mary Jane whispered back. “Got that dry kinda humor, you know?”

No.

“Well, you will.”

How delightful. Please continue.

Mary Jane did. She explained that Parker had gazed upon this Interloper’s over-achieving behavior with little patience and even less interest. He had it on good knowledge that the best thing to do with these kinds of things was to let the initiators wear themselves out. Mary Jane refused to say who’s knowledge this was, but she said that he’d resolved to do just that.

By day five, it seemed to be working. The Interloper had started to grow tired. But then, to amend that, he decided to take a job from the Avengers. And that’s where things started to get a little problematic.

Parker didn’t know that this guy had gone with the Avengers until the Avengers called him to ask where the hell he was and why he wasn’t in the decided position.

Parker informed them that he still wasn’t speaking to them after some kind of conflict with one of their members. He told them to stuff it and hung up.

They called back—apparently the Black Widow this time, with whom Parker was not actively feuding, and she clarified that he was not presently in Wakanda.

Parker laughed and informed her cheerfully that he was presently in Tribeca, trying to get a picture of the Mayor’s new baby. It was going poorly for him, so he’d have to call her back.

She didn’t let him hang up and repeated, painfully slowly, that Parker was _not_ in Wakanda. Parker sent her a pin of his location and then realization dawned on both of them.

Parker got the shot and hurried away from the scene to somewhere that he could speak more openly. The Widow confirmed the presence of the Interloper among their company. And then both stood in shocked silence on opposite sides of the world and tried desperately to think through what was happening.

The Interloper had fooled the Avengers and gotten access to Avengers security information. He had picked up Parker’s clearance ID. He’d flirted with the Princess of Wakanda. He was more than capable. More than efficient. He talked like Parker and walked with that classic Spiderman swagger.

No one had even noticed that he wasn’t who he said he was until that phone call.

And now everyone was frozen in place.

The Avengers confronted the Interloper. The Interloper took offense and claimed that _Parker_ was the imposter. He laid out information that only Parker had access to, to prove it.

This left the Avengers in a pickle.

It was no longer clear who was Spiderman.

“It’s like this guy’s trying to replace Peter,” Mary Jane said. “He climbed in here—in _here_ , Mr. Jameson, to this apartment just the other night and got in bed with me.”

“And you could tell?” Jonah asked.

Mary Jane stared at him.

“Peter’s my husband,” she said.

Well, right but—

“You don’t want to know how I can tell.”

How could she be so sure about that? Jonah had quite a bit riding on this whole thing now. He was, whether he wanted to be or not, invested.

“My husband is Jewish, Mr. Jameson.”

Okay? Yes? And?

Mary Jane leaned an elbow on the table and partially covered her mouth. Her forehead was furrowed seriously.

“Mr. Jameson,” she said quietly. “Peter’s circumcised.”

…Well, he’d walked right into that one.

“That man was not.”

Information: regretted. Was it warm in here?

“That creep walked right into this house, got right into my bed, and was about to let me fuck him without saying a goddamn thing.”

“Creep-alert,” Doctor Miles said decidedly. “Spidey flipped his shit.”

Mary Jane sighed.

“Peter’s patience is infinite,” she said. “But he does have some boundaries.”

Jonah honestly didn’t blame him.

“So he started to undermine this person?” he asked.

“Something like that,” Mary Jane said. “More like unmask.”

Un—oh.

Oh, now that was very clever. Good on you, Parker. The Avengers would know from the face whether or not this guy was lying.

“He managed to get it off, too, you know. He says the guy’s the ‘wrong model?’”

The what?

Mary Jane smiled at him indulgently.

“What’s your poison?” she asked.

The door opened halfway through the second glass of whiskey. Vodka would have brought the current clarity on more quickly, Jonah now understood, but he hadn’t been prepared for what he was about to experience.

No one could have been prepared for it.

Peter Parker stepped into his home looking like he’d just emerged from a man-sized blender.

“Good news,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Red’s asserted dominance for yet another day.”

Doctor Miles popped up from the couch with a young calico cat on his shoulders.

“Did he get him?” he asked.

“No idea,” Parker said. “But it doesn’t really matter. We got bigger problems. Doc, suit up. We need to go talk to the others.”

“Which others?”

Parker’s lips thinned.

“As many of them as we can get,” he said. “I got a feeling about this one and it’s _deep_.

Jonah felt sick. Parker finally looked at him. Really, really looked at him.

“Mr. Jameson,” he said, bowing his head, “I gotta say, I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have had to get mixed up in this. But I’m going to set it right.”

Ugh. Awful. This whole thing was just one living nightmare.

“For now, stay here with MJ,” Parker said. “We’ll be back as soon as we can. Wade’ll come around soon. He won’t hurt you. Or MJ. Or anyone, I promise. I just can’t let you go back to _The Bugle_ until I know this guy’s not waiting there to hold you hostage.”

Lovely. Great to finally have an explanation. Marks off for timing and trauma, though, Mr. Parker, on top of detention for the next three billion years.

Parker’s eyes dropped even further along with his shoulders.

“I didn’t want it to have to end like this,” he said. “Thank you for your patience, Mr. Jameson. I’ll clear my shit out as soon as I get back.”

Right.

That was—

Yes. That was probably for the best.

“Are we going now?” Doc asked.

Parker shook his head and stepped away.

“Gimme a minute to change,” he said.


	7. all pawns to aisle three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Morning, folks,” Benj greeted like this was his weekly Tuesday. “Does anyone have a match?”  
> Bitsy took Tats’s hand before he raised it and pushed it down to his side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello hello
> 
> **ITSV Miles POV**
> 
> Tats = Inimitable Spidey  
> Peter/Blondie = RiPeter  
> B. = Peter B. Parker  
> Benj = Noir  
> Agave = Andrew Garfield Spidey  
> MJ = Peter B.'s Mary Jane  
> Bitsy = Inimitable Miles  
> Matt = ITSV Miles's Matt Murdock  
> Gwen = ITSV Gwen

Miles felt the pull as he hustled Matt off the bus and told him to mind the curb. Matt made a curious sound and Miles looked up to find him making an owl face at him.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Your neck,” Matt said, reaching out fingers. They were cold when they found the skin right below Miles’s hairline.

“You can feel that?” Miles asked him.

“What is it?”

It was the pull. The others. Someone was calling. This particular call was strong; it felt like a broad hand pushing against Miles’s sternum and top vertebrae at the same time.

It was Peter B.

He was calling for Miles.

Maybe he’d know where Peter was?

“The others are trying to get in touch with me,” Miles said. “I think they might know where Peter is. I need to answer them.”

Matt frowned and seemed to do a body check of himself. He moved his head back and forth as though glancing down at his shoulders, and then chewed his lip.

“Well, alright, how do you do that?” he asked.

Mile blinked at him.

Peter B. was pulling him, pulling him, pulling him, and when Miles finally reached back to him and breathed deep, the fabric between their worlds gave way to Doc, of all people, sitting on the floor of Peter B.’s living room wearing his suit up to the neck with Peter B.’s cat cradled against his chest.

“This is fine,” Doc told the cat.

“WHAT THE HELL—”

“Fine, totally fine,” Doc carried on. He rolled Egg over in his arms so that she was hanging happily right-side-up again and gave Miles a chin nod.

“Sup, Itsy?” he asked.

There was a new man there on the couch not far from him. Miles didn’t know him. He had stripes of gray in his hair and jabbed a shaky finger Miles’s way. Seemed kind of anxious.

“Can my Matt come with?” Miles asked Doc.

Doc shrugged a single shoulder.

“Ask the big guy,” he said. “It’s his house.”

Miles looked up to find Peter B. He looked sad. All his happy wrinkles were slack and his eyes looked gray. Miles stepped forward enough to wrap arms around his chest. He wasn’t warm.

He was sad.

What was happening to all of them?

“Can Matt come with?” Miles asked quietly.

He felt Peter B.’s big hand cup around the back of his head until his middle finger brushed Miles’s ear.

“Yeah,” B. said. “He can come.”

The man on the couch having a meltdown was B’s boss. Old boss. Former? Boss?

It was stupid.

B was the best photographer Miles knew. He was a fantastic artist. He had a silly old-school sense of style and was terrible at using spray paint, but Miles didn’t think that that made him less of an asset to _The Bugle_.

“You should rehire him. He’s tall and friendly and he taught me how to be Spiderman,” Miles told Mr. Jameson firmly.

Mr. Jameson kept jerking his face back and forth from Miles’s to Doc’s. Miles could feel himself getting irritated. Matt’s hand found his shoulder and squeezed and Mr. Jameson seemed to notice him for the first time.

He flinched like he’d been burned.

“I didn’t teach you how to be Spiderman, Miles. You taught yourself. Where’s Gwen? Why isn’t she answering?” B said above them all.

Miles didn’t know. They hadn’t spoken in a while. B made a sound through his teeth.

“Can you call Bitsy?” he asked. “Tats ain’t pickin’ up.”

“That’s ‘cause he’s burning his evil twin in a lake or something,” Miles said. “Bitsy told me so.”

The room seemed to go still.

“He’s doing what?” B asked for his group.

“Burning his double,” Miles repeated for him.

“I think I like him?” Doc said.

B ignored him like always.

“Where’s Blondie?” he asked.

And that was the question of the day, really.

“We’re not sure,” Matt said. “We’ve been searching for him, but I haven’t spoken to him in a few days and this other guy, he’s—”

“Tried to replace him,” B said with a grumpy eye roll. “Honey, tell me about it. Blondie, Imma get you a fuckin’ leash—”

Oh, now _that_ would be very helpful.

“Itsy. Call Bitsy please,” B said. “Get him to remind Tats that arson’s a felony in every state in every universe and to drag his happy ass this way. Doc, do me a solid; do you remember Benj? Skinny? Black and white? Was insulted about the allen wrenches? Can you throw out a line for him? He ain’t answerin’ me either.”

B was in an organizing mood. He was using his group-discussion tone. There was no arguing with that.

“Can they bring people if they need to?” Miles asked.

B paused and considered it.

“Not Tats and Bitsy,” he said. “Everyone else can bring one person. I got a fire code to adhere to here.”

Tats was, er.

“He’s not fine,” Bitsy said.

“I’M FINE.”

Not fine.

“I’m cool,” Tats yammered on. “GOD, look how cool I am. I’m _so_ cool—Hey. B. Big guy, tell me I’m cool.”

“No one’s cool right now, pal,” B said without opening his eyes. Gwen still wasn’t answering. They’d all tried twice.

“Good news, I ain’t no one,” Tats snapped. Then paused. “Who’re you?” he accused Mr. Jameson on the couch like he was in a police interviewee in a dark room. “What’re you lookin’ at? You want some of this?”

“Spidey,” Bitsy said. “You’re bein’ aggressive.”

“Says who?” Tats demanded.

Miles knew what this needed.

A hug.

Tats’s heart freaked out against Miles’s ear at first. It went a little haywire, but then Bitsy joined in and the combined pressure of them both squeezing seemed to chill Tats out a little bit. He smelled bitter and acrid and…smoky?

“You didn’t actually burn anyone did you?” Miles asked him, tipping his head back to meet his eyes.

Tats stared down at him for a long time.

“No, and it’s tragic,” he said.

Bitsy snickered.

“B!!”

Miles tore himself out of the hug before he even knew he was doing it.

“Thank God for you,” Peter—the right Peter’s voice said.

Miles wriggled past Bitsy and Tats and launched himself at Peter’s middle. Hands immediately came up around his shoulders.

“Oof. Oh. Hey, you, what’s goin’ on?”

The relief was immeasurable. Peter wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t dead. He was tall and blonde and wearing his suit like he was supposed to; his eyes were clear and he wasn’t all floaty. And most importantly, that double hadn’t killed him or left him out of the In-Between for too long.

“Woah, Miles, buddy? Matt? What’s goin’ on?” Peter asked over Miles’s head more gently.

Miles didn’t hear Matt’s explanation on his behalf because there was a crack like a gunshot on the other side of the room followed by someone shouting, “MOVE.”

Benj threw himself onto the floor like he was jumping off a train and took Doc out with him. They both hit the carpet, and Benj scrambled up and tore the window behind him closed as Miles seen his mom do with the front room curtains a thousand times.

After a moment of panting, Benj straightened out; he wasn’t wearing his mask. He wasn’t even wearing his coat. He was wearing a collared white shirt with thin belts on the arms up above his elbows. The shirt was untucked in places with the collar sticking straight up on one side. He had dirt all over his pants. He turned back to the rest of them with eyes obscured by a pair of huge round glasses with the left lens cracked.

“Morning, folks,” he greeted like this was his weekly Tuesday. “Does anyone have a match?”

Bitsy took Tats’s hand before he raised it and pushed it down to his side.

Peter had been with Peni and Peni was _freaking out_. She had SP//DR tucked in her hands and pressed against her chest and she refused to let anyone see him or talk to her. Peter made her sit on the floor in between his long legs while he kneaded at her shoulders.

Miles didn’t often see Peni in her suit. It didn’t look like anyone else’s in the room.

“I’m sorry,” Peter told Miles and Matt specifically. “Peni called me a few days ago on account of some problems.”

“MURDER,” Peni half-wailed into her hunched up chest.

Peter kneaded her shoulders faster.

“No murder,” he said pleasantly. “We have other means of hurting people we don’t like, don’t we?”

Peni made an unhappy sound of agreement.

Miles’s eyebrows were stuck in a forehead wrinkle, maybe, because they would not come down. The good news was that B’s were stuck that way too from the looks of it.

“Leaving that for now,” B said, “Can I get some survival figures for Gwen?”

Peter straightened his back and frowned.

“They were high last Friday,” he said.

That meant nothing, unfortunately. Gwen’s verse was notoriously everyone else’s nightmare verse.

“Well, she’s not answering now,” B said. “Can you go grab her?”

“For sure,” Peter said, standing up and handing Peni off to B. “Just one second.”

B made everyone sit in a circle while they waited for Peter to come back. He went and took a notebook off his bookshelf and started tearing out pages, which he then handed out as MJ gave out pens to everyone.

B told them all to write down what had been happening in as much detail as humanly possible, and the room went the kind of quiet that Miles usually found in art classrooms in the middle of the day.

He sat himself down next to Matt and started writing.

At the five minute mark, he looked up and found Peni nearly tearing the paper with how furious she was going at it. She wasn’t writing in English. Miles was a little afraid to touch or talk to her. Bitsy and Tats on the other hand, had torn their paper into a lot of smaller pieces and pooled these between them. They appeared to be making a flowchart on the ground in front of them.

Benj was gazing out the window like he’d already finished the assignment and had a date that night.

B collected the finished papers and flicked through them. The only sound in the room was the rustling of the pages in his hands for a long while, or at least until Egg presented herself and made a beeline for Matt. Miles nabbed her before she could climb up his arm and deposited her in Benj’s lap. He gave her to Bitsy. Bitsy gave her to Tats.

Tats let her climb up onto his head and gave no sign of noticing that she was even there.

The next round of quiet wasn’t to last.

A window tore open with a sound like ripping cotton and Peter lurched back in with Gwen in his arms. She looked way surprised. Her hair was soaked.

“YOU stay,” Peter threatened the person on the other side of the window. “Stay right there.”

“Oh, shit, hey,” Gwen said, throwing her wet hair out of her face. “Did you guys get Murder-napped too?”

Did—did they get—did they get--?

“I’m not even fucking around,” Peter warned over her heard.

“You want her? Fine, have her. Boil her,” a voice said.

Wait. _Murder_ -napped? GWEN. Murder—

“It’s okay, Blondie, he can come,” Gwen said. “He’s trying to kill me less than everyone else right now.”

Peter stared down at her in his arms. He brought his face up towards B. B’s eyebrows were never ever coming back from war at this rate. That was his new face now.

“I--?” B stammered.

“What’s the matter?” that heavy, oily voice through the tear asked. “Is it truly so impossible to believe?”

The Spidey Sense roared awake and Miles was on his feet—everyone was on their feet—in an instant.

Murderdock looked like an orange snake. He wasn’t smiling, though. Matt made a growling sound next to Miles and reached back to shove him behind him. Miles planted his feet.

“Aww, how cute,” Murderdock crooned. “A nest of rats. Like I said, you want her? Take her. I’ll handle things with or without her.”

“No.”

Miles’s spine jerked in shock.

Gwen squirmed out of Peter’s grip and ducked under his arm. She wasn’t wearing her suit. She was wearing a gray shirt that sloped off her shoulders and a pair of shiny athletic tights that wrinkled around her ankles. She stepped back and spread her arms.

She made herself into a shield between Murderdock and the rest of them.

“Listen to me,” she enunciated to their group. “He’s _not_ trying to hurt me.”

Benj’s chin came up defiantly. Tats’s went down as a threat.

“He’s—I didn’t believe it either, but he’s trying to help me,” Gwen said.

Miles’s head was spinning, crashing through memories of Murderdock cracking knuckles against Doc Oct’s tentacle arms. Remembering the brutal efficiency, the barely-there gleam of orange hair as he vanished into a hot Chicago night and left behind him the skeleton of a drug trade. Just a few hours.

He’d done all that in a handful of hours.

Now, he stood on the other side of the space-window in an apartment of sorts. It was nearly empty. It had all of the things that a home was supposed to have in it, but none of them looked used. There was no art on the walls and next to no color in the room. Even the hardwood floor seemed muted.

Murderdock himself stood with no shoes. No socks. He had no weapon—not a stick or a sword or a knife, none of it—at hand. He was wearing a black hoodie, actually, with the sleeves shoved up the forearms, and had a phone that kept blinking with new messages in his hand.

It was as though they’d caught him at home.

But somehow Gwen was there? And wet? Like she’d just gotten out of the shower.

Gwen had marks all over her. Her skin was red and raw-looking on her cheek and down her arm, but besides that, she was okay. There were no gashes or signs of dripping blood.

How—

What—

“I don’t like this whatever it is,” Murderdock informed the window. “Remove it from my place of residence.”

“I’m working on it,” Gwen volleyed back at him. “These people think you’ve kidnapped me.”

“That’s because I have.” Murderdock flicked his hand dismissively. “You’re remarkably heavy, by the way.”

“Thanks, fat-shamer,” Gwen said.

“You’re very welcome,” Murderdock said. “Close the thing. Report back on the proceedings if you wish to return to our arrangement. I have work to do.”

Gwen cut her eyes over her shoulder.

“You know what might make them less likely to try to kill you?” she asked. “If you came with me.”

The whole room became a funeral home in the middle of a service for a great-aunt that no one knew.

Murderdock’s head tilted slowly to the side.

“Oh no, it seems you’ve forgotten,” he said striding forward, only to stop at the very edge of the window. “We just discussed this. This is an arrangement of convenience for _me_ and me only.”

“They wouldn’t have gathered here if something wasn’t wrong with them too,” Gwen said. “My problem could be their problem which could be _your_ problem.”

“And what if it’s not?” Murderedock asked. “Do you even think? Do you _ever_ think? What proof do you have that these people are not the same breed as the one running around as an affront to—”

“Because that lady can’t open up space-time at her whim, asshole,” Gwen said.

“And how, praytell, do you know that?” Murderdock threw back at her. “How do you know that this very room is not filled to brimming with people who wish to throttle you and—”

“Because I can _see_ , Murdock,” Gwen said. “And these are my _friends_. Jesus. You’re so paranoid, I know my friends.”

“Do they know you?”

Miles felt his breath leave him.

“How well do they know you?” Murderdock asked. “How well does anyone in your life actually know you? Apparently not enough to be able to tell you apart from some kind of shape-shifting _vermin_. Your own father doesn’t know the woman in his house is not his daughter, Gwendolyn. Your friends haven’t reported you missing—so, you tell me: how well does _anyone_ know anyone in this world that you’ve created for yourself?”

The other Miles had left his bag and shoes at the front door.

The other Miles’s deeds were on the lips of the police correspondents.

The only person who had known that the Other Miles wasn’t Miles had been Wade.

Just Wade sitting underground on an abandoned platform with his palms up to heaven on his knees.

Matt hadn’t known. Peter hadn’t been there. Ganke hadn’t texted about the sudden flurry of sightings at night while he was sleeping in the same room as Miles. Miles himself hadn’t known for days. He hadn’t checked the news. He hadn’t questioned the appearance of his suit online in videos or snapshots.

He—

No one but Wade had known.

“ _You_ knew,” Gwen said softly.

“Of course I knew, I know everything that happens in this city,” Murderdock said. “I know where I need to stand and where you need to stand and I know every single thing about you, Gwen Stacy. Two days ago, I would have used that to kill you; two days ago I would have found you under that car and smashed in your pretty little head. But like I said before, you serve a purpose to me and for that and for that alone I will not let you die by my hand or anyone else’s until I’m ready for you to go. So you need to think hard about where you’re standing and who you’re standing with, child, because the people who claim that they know you best are nothing but liars. The only person who knows you is you. You and the person who’s planning your untimely demise. That’s all. That’s it.”

No.

No, that wasn’t true. There had to be other people. The Avengers knew that Peter wasn’t himself. They’d—

But Peter hated them.

Peter fought tooth and nail to escape them and their constant control and their check-ins and check-ups and their monitoring--the constant, constant, monitoring.

In a way, they were exactly what Murderdock said they were.

Oh god, no. It couldn’t be true.

“I’m not leaving these people.”

Miles’s head bounced back up.

“I trust these people,” Gwen said like a pale, blue-eyed lion. “And if you’re doing me the favor, then get over here and do it. Or are you as empty and useless as you say everyone else is?”

The air came back into Miles’s lungs.

Murderdock’s neck straightened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just fyi if you've been confused about what was happening with these doubles for the last few chapters, you were supposed to be ❤


	8. where did all the kings go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The doubles are from another verse,” he said.
> 
> “They think they know who we are,” Gwen said. “They’ve studied our stories.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still in ITSV Miles's POV!

Five minutes was all it took for the world to turn another twenty degrees closer to upside-down.

“This is overkill,” Gwen moaned into the palm of her hand.

Murderdock stayed stock-still. Peni gaped at him, looked at Miles and then pointed.

Yeah, girl. Miles saw it.

That was a sword.

Murderdock had set it at his side after he’d evidently made A Decision. He’d stepped away from the space-window and had disappeared for no more than a minute before he’d returned and stepped over the edge of the window of his own volition. He’d then proceeded to snatch Gwen from Peter and manhandle her into a corner of the room, where her back and sides were facing no human bodies.

He sat in front of her, painfully still and rigid on his heels.

He looked like a samurai. A white one with bright orange hair wearing a hoodie, but like, that all aside, he seriously gave off the air of a warrior who’d unsheathe that thing if anyone so much as twitched in Gwen’s direction.

Gwen looked like she was considering choking herself to unconsciousness.

“Please go back to being the worst and trying to kill me,” she said.

“It’s too late for begging,” Murderdock said stiffly.

“Where did you even get that thing? I thought you kept it in your stick?”

Murderdock ignored her in favor of fixing heavy eyebrows on Peter B.’s shoulder.

“Speak your piece, leader,” he said. “I’ll tolerate you as long as I can bear.”

B bared his teeth at MJ who slowly sunk down behind the kitchen counter. In her absence, he turned to Doc. Doc shook his head and shrugged his shoulders and hands.

Peni broke the silence. She spoke in Japanese, faster and faster, until Murderdock, surprisingly, nodded his head and replied to her in the same language. She froze and then released a torrent of words almost too fast for Miles to grab onto.

Gwen peeked out from behind Murderdock’s shoulder and he moved so that she couldn’t see anything past them. Peter put a hand on his face and made huge eyes about this at Tats who appeared much less violent than before. Intrigued, actually. He pointed as though offering an intervention. Peter shook his head.

B cleared his throat and cut Peni off.

“I, uh, hate to be that guy,” he said. “But perhaps we can do this in English, please?”

Peni stared up at him. She thumbed back at Murderdock.

“He says that Gwen’s got a double like the girl who tried to climb into SP//DR.”

Oh.

Okay, that was simple enough.

“He also says that she’s the wrong Gwen.”

Wrong Gwen? What did that even mean?

B’s eyes latched onto Murderdock.

“Elaborate,” he ordered.

Murderdock sneered at him.

“I don’t take orders from scum,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘wrong Gwen?’” B blazed through anyways. “I think I know what you’re saying, but I need more.”

“He thinks that she fights better than me,” Gwen said. “She’s—”

“Too tall.”

What?

“Too old,” Murderdock said tersely. “Voice is wrong. Weight is wrong. Age is wrong. Smell is wrong. No link between her and George Stacy. No shared detergent. No shared mold. Does not reek of Folgers Instant.”

Gwen gawked in offense.

“Excuse you, it’s not instant, we put it in the machine like everyone else,” she said.

Murderdock gave no evidence that he’d heard her.

“Right, so I recognize that this is going to be a painfully stupid thing to ask you,” B said, “But could you tell, by chance, if her face was the right shape?”

Murderdock made some kind of complex motion that made him look like both a confused dog and an insulted peacock all at once.

“Right,” B said.

“Fantastically stupid,” Murderdock told him.

“Obviously,” B said.

“ _Fascinatingly_ stupid actually, what begs the question?” Murderdock nearly purred.

B grimaced at him.

“The person—the Wrong Gwen, but for me, here in this verse—I got his mask off. He doesn’t look like me.”

Miles’s knees flattened against the floor.

“He doesn’t?” he asked.

“He’s a Tats model?” Peni asked.

Tats startled.

“No,” Peter B said, “Not at all. I thought he was, but then—actually, Tats, pull back your hair.”

“No, it’ll come out and I’ll die,” Tats said.

Peter stood up and Tats scrambled back and hissed at him and all his blue-eyed determination.

“Listen, there’s your model, our model, and Agave’s model,” Peter said. “And Agave is presently saving children trapped under a bus.”

Tats scrunched up his face mutinously.

“Get one of the kids to do it, then, they’ve still got strong follicles,” he said.

“Shortstack’s literally trying to eat his double right now and I can’t find Funsize anywhere,” Peter said. “It’s gotta be you, man.”

Tats’s shoulders came down from his ears. He sighed. He dragged his fingers back through his hair and held them there so that B could squint at him. B got up and bypassed Peter to get ahold of Tats’s face; he twisted it up and down and from side to side, then released him.

“Not this one,” he said.

Peter hummed.

“Maybe Agave then?” he asked.

“No, still too long,” B said. “This guy was round.”

“Round?” Tats blurted out. “God help us and him, honestly. Imagine if I still had cheeks.”

“Not like that,” B said. “Like, ovular. Square on bottom. Hair was way flat—I mean _way_ flat, guys.”

The other Peters all said a prayer for the dude.

“So he looked wrong. How does he think he can replace you then?” Benj piped up from the foot of the couch where he’d taken Egg for some intense petting.

“No one knows what Spiderman even looks like,” Gwen said. Murderdock moved as she did so that no one could see her still. She ducked under his arm. “Even if they were unmasked, then no one would know any different.”

Murderdock locked his arm around her head and pushed her back behind him by her shoulders.

“No, they wouldn’t. Unless said Spidey has people who do know what they look like,” B said. “Which, lucky me, I do.”

Doc waved. MJ, Miles suspected, had crawled on hands and knees to the bedroom with B’s former Boss.

“People like that would notice,” B said. “And they did notice. But there are other people who know who I am who didn’t notice because of the circumstances. Nat had no reason to ask the guy to take off his mask, for example.”

Miles lit up.

“That’s how Peter—Blondie’s—double must have done it in our verse,” he said.

“I have a double?” Peter asked him.

Miles reached out to pat at his shoulder.

“Well, fuck,” Peter said.

Pretty much, dude.

“Peni, you’re known in your verse,” B said. “Does this other girl look like you?”

There was a long pause.

“Oh,” Peni said. “I uh, haven’t seen her face? Blondie helped me flush her out of SP//DR and then she ran. She was wearing my suit. She had hair like mine—sort of. It was choppier though. Kinda, I dunno how to explain it? Like, super, super straight?”

Huh.

“Miles?” B asked.

It took a moment for Miles to realize that he was the one being addressed.

“I haven’t see him,” he said. “He’s got my clothes and stuff down pat. He was talking to my mom, but I don’t know if they were actually in the same room, now that you mention it.”

A moment of thoughtfulness took over the room.

“People know what I look like,” Peter said. “I’m technically a public personality now.”

Right.

“I’m not,” Tats said.

“Okay, but you have loads of people,” B said. “I’m sure they’d know it wasn’t you.”

“Can confirm,” Bitsy said. “We knew the second the other guy rolled up. Angel took him out at the knees. We thought he was a new copycat trying to join up.”

“They hazed him,” Tats said.

“We hazed him,” Bitsy confirmed. “He ran away and started doing solo stuff.”

“This is strange,” Peter B. said, “These people are trying to replace us, but it’s like they think that we don’t have people who know us outside of the mask. They’re so confident. I don’t understand. Lynne and Brenda noticed my double the second he walked in. They thought he was a new hire and were just about to evict him from my chair when I came in and handled him myself.”

None of this made any sense.

“What if,” Matt asked quietly. “They’re doing it because they think they already know what you look like.”

Everyone’s attention turned to him.

“Say more, little Red,” B encouraged.

Matt’s fingers found the loop of his stick and started fidgeting.

“I’m saying that what if—and it’s a big if, but what if these people are like—uh. Okay, imagine it like this, right? You’re six..”

“I’m six,” Tats said.

“I’m six and a half,” Peter said.

“I’m goin’ on 600 and I’m gonna put a muzzle on both of you, shut. Up,” B said.

Matt’s lips flickered into a smile before he caught himself.

“Okay, so you’re six and you read a—like, let’s say a comic,” Matt said. “Or you watch a tv show. And on the show or in the comic, Captain America shows up. And that’s great and amazing; he’s your favorite hero. You love him so much.”

Miles felt the first cog click into place in his head.

“Okay, now fast forward ten years,” Matt said. “And let’s presume you do not go blind in the span of this time. Captain America is found. Alive! He’s alive. And he gets dragged up to the surface and his face is all over everything. In every newspaper. On every social media platform. He’s everywhere. And people are—”

“Disappointed,” Miles finished for him.

Matt sought him out with a huge smile.

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s exactly it.”

“You don’t know what he looks like,” Miles said.

Matt beamed at him.

“I only know the picture from when I was six,” he said. “Everyone always says that he looks nothing like the comics, but in my head, he’s always going to have that face. That’s Captain America.”

“So whoever this is, they think that they know what Spiderman and Spiderwoman look like,” Matt said. “They must have seen your faces somewhere, but they weren’t quite right.”

Wait. Miles knew exactly what this was now. He knew because Ganke had a collection of Spiderman comics and the Peter Parker in them had brown hair and glasses and wore these sweater vests for the first half of most of them. But everyone knew now, for the last year at least, that Peter Parker, Spiderman, was a blond haired, blue-eyed noodle man who almost exclusively wore jeans and track bottoms that were too short for him.

Miles’s face snapped up.

“Where are they getting their info?” he asked.

B shook a fist and nodded in agreement with the question.

“Media?” Tats asked. “I’ve got comics in my verse. They’re…fine.”

“You hate them,” Bitsy said.

“They’re awful,” Tats amended.

Miles turned to B.

“B,” he said. “Do you have comics?”

B’s eyes blew wide.

“Me?” he asked. “Uuuuuuh. Maybe? I’ve got merch?”

No, man, come on. Comics? Movies? Action figures? Come on, think.

“UUUUUh. Oh. Actually. Do you know who would know that?” B said.

No. Who?

“Babe, you know I got all your shit,” B’s Wade said seriously to him like this was the start of an argument. “What’s the matter with you, are you sick? What’s up?”

“Wade,” B said with infinite patience, “It’s not less creepy when you tell me this kind of thing like I should know it, okay?”

“I thought you were goin’ places?”

“I was, but then I decided not to go places because no one was answerin’ me,” B said.

“I was ready to stand guard, boo,” B’s Wade said. “I was gonna sit on the J-man and everything.”

B cradled his Wade’s face in the palms of his hands.

“Schnookums, I need you to forget about the earlier babysitting plans and to _focus_ ,” he said not without affection. “Give me your me-comics.”

“Why? You gonna sell ‘em? I told you, Pete, I’ll be your sugar-daddy, you don’t gotta worry for money, honey, I got you—”

“WADE.”

“Alright, alright. Fine, have at ‘em.”

B said that the man in the comics did not look anything like his unmasked double. Namely because the guy in his comics looked remarkably like the guy in Ganke’s comics, and neither of these had a round enough face. This complicated things.

Nothing made sense.

Gwen’s gal was too tall and too old, but it was pretty well known in her verse that she was a teenager.

Peter’s double hadn’t taken off his mask in front of the Avengers even though they all knew what he was supposed to look like.

Tats’s double’s Queens accent was too strong and old-fashioned. Peni’s double’s haircut was too severe. Benj’s guy didn’t seem to know how to navigate horse-traffic.

They were all one step to the left of what should have been common knowledge in those verses.

“Murderdock has a suggestion,” Gwen chimed in the middle of an intense thought-session.

Murderdock appeared to contemplate the merits of homicide in that moment. On his face, that contemplation looked like someone deciding between a chocolate bunny or a chocolate egg on the Easter clearance aisle.

“We’re all ears,” B said.

“It was not a serious suggestion,” Murderdock told Gwen and Gwen only.

“I don’t think you understand,” Gwen said. “Among us, everything is a possibility.”

Murderdock bristled.

“He asked ‘what if it’s not media from any of our universes?’” Gwen announced for him.

The room seemed to grind to a halt.

“Oh, no,” Peter said.

All eyes went to him. His hands went up to rub at the sides of his neck.

“It’s possible,” he said, “Because there are some universes which don’t have Spidermen in them. I’ve only been in one so far.”

“What was it like?” Bitsy asked.

“Uh. Well. Awful,” Peter said. “Just? Yeah. Pretty awful. It’s everyone for themselves.”

“Wait,” B said. “That doesn’t make sense. I thought the only way you could move through the space was if there was another Spiderman to connect you to it. That’s how the multiverse uses you as a channel.”

“I didn’t say that Spiderman doesn’t exist in those verses,” Peter said. “I said that they didn’t have a Spiderman.”

“Spiderman is just a story there, then?” Benj offered quietly. “Like a legend?”

Peter set down the paper in his hands and sighed.

“Media,” he said. “Stuff like this exists.” He held up one of B’s comics and set it back down. “But the person himself is an impossibility. It’s strange. Awkward. None of the people who we know—Cap, Ironman, Spiderman, the Fantastic Four—no one exists beyond the image in those kinds of verses. To them, we’re symbols.”

“If all these people are from a verse which has the media, but not the people, then it would make sense that they’d have different ideas of who all of us are and what we all look like,” Peter continued.

But they wouldn’t know the culture would they?

Miles couldn’t blame them. He’d never thought about the wider worlds of other universes until he and Gwen had argued about the color of Dotify for half an hour while Peter B held his head and asked why it was called ‘Dotify’ when clearly it was ‘Spotify’ and it was _green_ , man.

A book.

A comic.

They were only snapshots. They fed you what you needed to know when you needed to know it. But real lives weren’t like that. The pictures that Miles drew where never the same as the people they represented.

They were always an ideal. Miles’s ideals. Someone’s ideals.

“The doubles are from another verse,” he said.

“They think they know who we are,” Gwen said. “They’ve studied our stories.”

“Possibly trained themselves in our styles,” Bitsy added.

They didn’t know how the multiverse worked, though. They didn’t know their stories were unique to their own universe.

“Why us?” B said.

“Why not?” Tats volleyed back. “Imagine you’re a lonely soul in your home universe. People talk over you. People act like you’re not even there. You watch people get hurt. You feel the need to help—you crave the rush and satisfaction afterwards. What would be better than being a hero? Why not be Spiderman? We’re the most accessible option.”

Well, in Miles’s opinion, making some friends was the most accessible option, but that was neither here, nor there.

“They’re trying to edge us all out, though,” he said. “This is angry. They aren’t just lonely folks looking for meaning.”

“Itsy’s right,” B said. “There has to be some other reason.”

“Well, if anyone’s got any ideas, then let ‘em rip,” Tats said.

There was a long pause.

“There is a simple solution to this problem.”

All heads turned slowly, slowly back to the corner of the room, where Gwen was once again being held hostage by the wall.

The distance between Murderdock’s knee and his sword couldn’t be more than a single hand’s breadth. His sunglasses seemed a darker red in the gradually dying light.

“Two solutions, actually,” Murderdock said, “However, I am operating under the impression that you’ll be opposed to the cleaner one.”

Death.

Murder.

This guy had earned his name for a reason.

Miles felt Matt’s hand creeping back to his shoulder, threatening again to pull him back behind him for safety.

“What’s the second one?” B asked.

Murderdock’s closed fists sat on the top of his thighs.

“We ask them,” he said simply.


	9. knight at night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “There’s just one problem. We need her alive," Murderdock said.
> 
> “Do we really?” Elektra purred.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I haven't forgotten about this fic. 
> 
> POV Murderdock

Game set.

“Uh? Murder—I mean Murdock?”

Game set.

Game set.

Game set.

“Listen, dude, I can’t read anything about you. Is this happy excitement or deadly excitement? Both are bad, don’t get me wrong, but like, should I gird my loins or buy a leash or--?”

The tall, husky Spiderperson with the strong accent had said ‘talk’ and something about that tone sent a little trill of something shivery through Matt’s guts and spine. It made him feel a little giddy.

Stick. That’s who Tall and Husky reminded him of. He had a strong accent like Stick. Strong and husky with a rasp at the back of the throat. God, how long had it been since Matt had properly thought about Stick? Stick, Stick, Stick—sensei, apologies for being so rude and forgetful.

Matt would make up for it, absolutely. Cross his heart.

“Murder— _Murdock_?”

“Your tall person reminds me of an old acquaintance,” Matt benevolently informed Stacy over her agitating. She went quiet.

“My? Tall person?” she repeated. “He’s not that much taller than you, though?”

Garbage. Trash. This child wouldn’t know a tall person if they hung her from a cliff. Matt knew tall people and they sounded like _Stick_.

“Murder—dude what can I call you?”

The question caught Matt by surprise, so much so that he stopped in the middle of the pavement. He turned back Stacy’s direction. There was tension in the handful of sweatshirt he had between his fingers.

“Did you say something?” he asked pleasantly.

“Yeah,” Stacy spat, pulling harder now. “I _said_ what can I call you? I can’t just go around calling you ‘Murderdock’ out on the street now can I?”

Matt didn’t see why not. It sounded like a hilarious inside-joke to him.

“ _Murdock_.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “I don’t care. Names have no meaning to me.”

A lie. He wasn’t sure why he said it. It just slipped out of his lips before he could stop it.

“Do I call you…Matt?” Stacy asked in a tone laced with hesitancy and disgust.

Hm. Mm. Yeah, no. That felt bad for him, too.

“You’ll call me what you wish,” he said. Then paused and smirked. “For now,” he added.

Stacy was an unwilling accomplice, which Matt expected, but he did not expect this much resistance from someone who he was actively trying to support. He thought that he’d made his stance on her situation here clear, and yet she still wanted information. She kept demanding to know what he was thinking and where they were going. She dug in her heels and demonstrated hesitancy to leave the alleys of their city, which was, again, perplexing.

Perhaps she feared the Imposter coming out of a corner to attack her? Perhaps she didn’t trust the tall, husky Spider as much as she’d claimed to? Perhaps she didn’t believe Matt when he’d told the tall husky Spider that he was more than capable of locating, disarming, and wringing information out of a body without exercising lethal methods.

Any way around, Stacy was getting sticky and that wouldn’t do. Matt was on a schedule here. He had a few more hours before he had to sleep for the night shift. And if things went according to plan, Stacy needed to get on that train, too.

“Would you just say _something_?” Stacy asked from behind him.

She sounded thick. Something was wrong with her throat.

He turned around, already counting possible poisons and found her heat concentrating in her face.

Wh— _what??_

The tension on the fabric still trapped in his fingers dropped downwards. Stacy had let her arm go slack. She’d gone quiet. Her heartbeat was hard to pick out with the cars one street over rushing over some kind of defect in the road.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “You heard the Tall Person. We must locate the—”

Stacy swallowed badly. Matt felt his eyes narrow.

“Just. Talk to me,” Stacy said after a long time. “Please. I just want to know what’s going on. I don’t know—I can’t read your mind, Murdock.”

He loosened his grip on the sweater sleeve until it fell away with Stacy’s arm.

“What are we doing?” Stacy asked him. “Why—you didn’t let Peter B finish what he was saying? We should have stayed to let him finish talking. We don’t know how to catch this lady, and we don’t know where to—”

Who was this kid, now? Matt didn’t recognize this need for hand-holding or closure. The Spiderwoman he knew went straight for the jugular every time.

“What are you talking about?” he interrupted. “Why are you talking like this?”

“Wh-what do you mean?” Stacy asked. “I’m—”

“Why are you afraid?” Matt snapped. “This woman is trying to steal your life and you’re _scared_ , Gwendolyn?”

Stacy went silent. She must have been staring at him. People were terrible about doing that, they ought to at least have the decency to narrate it.

“Yeah?” Stacy said. “I am? I feel like that’s a normal reaction to this whole deal, my man.”

“Is it useful?” Matt volleyed back. “Is being scared helping you right now?”

“Y—I mean--”

“No,” Matt cut her off. “It ain’t. You know what is? Me. And anger. You should be mad, Spider-child. You should be _furious_.”

More silence. Presumably more staring.

“Did you just say ‘ain’t?’”

Fucking children. Always latching onto the most inconsequential details.

“This woman is holding your father hostage and left you under a car to bleed out into a storm drain,” Matt laid out for her to the sound of someone coming out for a smoke break doing an abrupt about-face back into their building. “What is it you want from this situation, Stacy? Do you want to wait? Pray tell, how does that get us closer to, as the Tall Spider says, ‘getting some damn answers?’”

The sound of gravel grated up from the girl’s feet. Shuffling around now, was she? Matt would bet good money she couldn’t look him in the face.

“I don’t _know_ what to feel,” Stacy snapped. “I’m always angry. Always, always, always. But being angry isn’t going to help my dad be safe. It’s only ever caused problems, so I need to _think_. This isn’t about me, Murdock. This is about him, and I need like twenty minutes to plan so that he doesn’t lose his life as a result of my recklessness. Alright?”

Oho.

That was better. Much better.

But also darling. So darling. So cute. Elektra was working on this very same issue with Samuel as they spoke.

It was so basic.

“Who trained you?” Matt asked.

“What?”

“I said, who trained you?” Matt repeated. “They’re shit. Get a new teacher.”

Stacy’s lip made a wet sound. She was either sucking on it or biting it, either way, Matt took that as permission to stomp on.

“Have you never worked on a team, Gwendolyn?” he asked.

“Uh. Yeah. Sort of.”

What did that mean?

“I mean, like. I’ve worked with the other Spiderfolks before. And we always have a plan—”

No. No, no, no. What? No. That was the wrong kind of team. No.

“A two-man team,” Matt specified. “Have you ever worked a two-man team?”

He got nothing.

“Who trained you?” he asked again. “This is absurd. You don’t even know how to yield, that’s unforgiveable. Fire your teacher, they ain’t worth shit.”

There was a long pause.

“You think someone trained me?” Stacy asked. “You can’t be—do I _look_ like someone’s trained me?”

Well, that was a question for someone who could see.

“Are you being funny, dude? Because it’s not funny. No. _I_ train me. That’s who my teacher is. Me. And I don’t even know what you’re talking about. ‘Yield?’ The fuck is that? You mean like shifting lead? Like letting someone else take the front?”

What on earth were these words?

No. Yielding was yielding. When your partner knows more than you, you yield. When your partner has what you don’t, you yield. When you’re 17 years old and blind as a fucking bat and Elektra can see an oncoming pipe that sounds more like whistle to you than anything else, you yield like your life depends on it.

Because it does. It always does.

Matt felt his forehead setting into folds as he processed what was happening before him.

“You don’t know how to yield,” he translated.

“You want me to follow your lead?” Gwen asked. “Fine. I don’t have a choice. But the least you can do is tell me what’s happening.”

She wasn’t understanding.

“You don’t know how to yield?” Matt repeated.

“Where are we going? What are we doing? How are we going to catch this lady? Like, come on, dude, give me something to work with.”

Fffffffffuck.

She didn’t know how to yield.

Right. Okay, plan A wasn’t going to work. They needed a plan B.

On the upside, a jaunt through the city appeared to lift Stacy’s spirits. She’d started calling Matt names now. Her heat was ramping up. She was getting angry.

 _Finally_ , she was doing something useful while Matt tried to sniff out the remnants of citrus and pine.

It was taking too long. He had to change tact.

He stopped abruptly as Stacy was naming reasons off her fingers why she thought that she should alert her father of the present situation somehow. She crashed into his back. He spun around and loomed over her to silence the cursing before it began.

“We need to change,” he told her.

He could navigate Hell’s Kitchen in his sleep. There was a clothing store two blocks from his current place of residence. It was a consignment place. It always smelled of old leather and must. At the moment, however, it was open and that was Matt’s only requirement.

He shoved Stacy through the door and kept a hand on her shoulder and a smile on his face while he told her to go pick out something business casual.

She did not like the hand. Her fingers dug into Matt’s knuckles as though she thought she could pop the tops of them off like bottlecaps.

She hissed at him, demanding to know why she needed to change clothes.

“Because,” he told her through clenched teeth away from the gal at the register in the front of the store, “If you walk into the embassy like that, you’re going to get us both thrown out.”

Stacy was allegedly dressed appropriately. Matt left her in the foyer of his apartment under the threat that if one of those shoes so much as tapped his flooring, she would suffer the loss of the foot. He went and tore off his sweatshirt.

It was time for something a little more comfortable.

He informed Stacy that congratulations were in order. She was now his paralegal.

She made confused sounds. Matt ignored them. If no one else was going to teach this kid to yield, then by god, he would do it.

Dad had always said if you wanted something done right, then you had to do it yourself.

Stick said the same thing, so by the law of averages, they had to be right.

He made it a point later at sub-street level to bend Stacy’s elbow himself so that he could hold onto it and make people on the train stop trying to separate them. Fuckin’ rude. God, the subway ought to be abolished.

He made a note of it.

The embassy sounded busy. Stacy kept asking him question about it that he ignored in favor of A) teaching her how to yield already, come _on_ , kid. Is it really that hard? And B) listening for the clack of Nike’s pumps.

Nike knew him and she always wore a set of Louboutins in an attempt to terrify all of the other receptionists in their shared territory. Matt appreciated her assertion of dominance and the scent of her perfume.

Finally, a woman with taste.

He found her from the click of her polished nails and the little clink of the rings on two of her fingers.

Her typing stopped when he approached her desk.

“Matthew,” she greeted lovingly.

“Nike,” Matt greeted. “My dearest, you smell like war herself.”

Nike hummed darkly.

She wanted to fuck. If Stacy were not presently on this journey, Matt might have had second thoughts about the unspoken offer that was always waiting here at this desk, but alas. Foggy had feelings about Matt’s sexual encounters with the ladies at Elektra’s workplace.

“Is Elektra in today?” Matt asked politely.

“Perhaps,” Nike said. “I believe that she’s—”

She cut herself off. Stacy moved in Matt’s grip. She seemed to be looking behind them. Someone was approaching. Matt turned back himself and felt a sudden drop of cold dread at the base of his spine.

This was _not_ part of the plan.

“I know she doesn’t like to speak about such things, Matthew, really,” the baritone next to him said with disappointment dripping like tar.

“But she is getting on in the years, as are you, my son,” Hugo Natchios himself carried on. “And we both know how close you two have always been.”

Stacy had to jog to keep up with the pace Hugo had set for both him and Matt. His arm was uncomfortably warm where he’d insisted Matt take it.

“I know it’s old-fashioned, but perhaps you two might consider settling down. Together, I mean,” Hugo said hopefully.

“I—Ambassador,” Matt said. “I appreciate the sentiment, but I thought we had previously discussed this?”

“Ah, yes,” Hugo said. “I remember, but see, I did some reading and ‘bisexual’ means that you appreciate women as well, correct?”

HHHHHHHH.

YIELDING. Matt was YIELDING.

“Isn’t it convenient how you two are similar down to the core?”

ELEKTRA. HELP.

“Such a fulfilling marriage it would be. And you two aren’t _that_ old; one of our ladies is 38 but got pregnant just last week. So there’d be some time after the wedding even, if not before. Not that it is any of my business, Matthew.”

Jesus? Jesus, are you listening? Because Elektra sure as fuck wasn’t and Stacy sure as hell was. She kept making choked sounds that Matt didn’t need in his life while he was being stabbed by fate like this.

“Why don’t we say this, Ambassador?” he started.

“Matthew, we’ve been through this so many times. Call me ‘Hugo.’”

 _Never_.

“Ambassador,” Matt repeated. “I will take it under advisement. As always.”

“Please do, Matt. You’re a good boy, and she’s a good girl. You two deserve a happy life together. Ah, Tasha. Please tell my daughter that Matthew is here to visit her. Have a good lunch, Matt and--?”

“Gwen,” Matt huffed.

“Gwen,” Hugo said benevolently down in Stacy’s direction. “Keep an eye on those two, yes?”

Stacy wheezed out a ‘yes, sir’ and Hugo finally, blessedly left them to tap his hard leather soles down the hallway back towards the office.

It took every once of self-respect and restraint that Matt had to keep himself from draping himself over Tasha’s desk. She’d probably hit him with the nearest magazine.

“Elektra?” he asked.

Tasha snapped her gum.

“What are you _doing_ here?” Elektra hissed after she’d crowded Matt and Stacy into what was presumably a breakroom, if the smell of mold and bread was anything to go by.

“Being harassed by your father,” Matt snapped back. “I need a favor.”

“I’m working, Matthew—Gwen? What are you doing here?”

“Learning,” Stacy said in an irritatingly upbeat tone.

Matt made a note of it for later.

Elektra’s hair swished as she redirected her attention to him.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

Matt took a big breath.

Elektra knew how to get them out of this godforsaken building without drawing Hugo’s attention, and Matt would yield to her any day of the week, any week of the year if it meant he didn’t have to endure that man’s presence again.

“ _Tell him_ ,” he grated out on the way towards the exit.

“I can’t tell him, he’ll die of a heart attack,” Elektra grated right back.

“He’s looked up ‘bisexual;’ I can’t drop a bigger hint,” Matt snapped.

“Just tell him you’ve decided you’re gay,” Elektra hissed.

“You first.”

“No, you.”

“I’m not lying to your father,” Matt said.

“Why not? I lie to him every day and he’s just fine. Come here, Gwen, that’s fine. It’s always like that.”

Elektra had the appropriate reaction to being told that Stacy had been replaced by an imposter with training and lethal intent. Matt decided that he’d give her a little nudge in the right direction when she clicked her tongue in preparation for asking some questions.

“She has upset Samuel,” he said.

Stacy’s knuckles popped.

“How so?” Elektra asked lightly, even though her heart rate kicked up a good three notches.

Matt prepared himself for the onslaught. He barely got through the sentence before Elektra told him that she’d heard enough.

“I’m going to kill her,” she said coldly.

Matt smiled.

“I would love to,” he said. “But there’s just one problem. We need her alive.”

“Do we really?” Elektra purred.

No, they actually did. Matt had given his word.

“Take it back.”

“Uh?” Stacy interrupted.

There was a pause.

“Fine, don’t take it back,” Elektra said. “Where is she?”

“That’s the trouble,” Matt said. “She’s shacked up at George Stacy’s place and has left Gwendolyn here out in the cold. With me.”

“Oh god, hon. I’m so sorry,” Elektra said. “You can stay with me and Sammy, no one deserves to have to sleep in Cat’s territory.”

Matt snapped his fingers to get her to focus. She grabbed his wrist and twisted it hard enough to make it creak.

Aw. He’d missed this.

“I have a half a thought,” he said. “But I need a goody-two-shoes to have the other half of it for me.”

Elektra’s hair slid across itself again as she titled her head.

“Goody-two-shoes present,” she said. “Go on.”

It was simple.

The Imposter didn’t know this world like she thought she did. She was collecting information as they spoke and soon she would be searching out Stacy to finish off the job. So they had to stop her in her tracks and somehow throw her back into the deep end.

They—him, Elektra, and Stacy—needed to know more than what this woman knew. These tables needed to turn, and there was only one way that they could make that happen within the given parameters.

They had to write a new story.

Objective set: write a new story.

Step 1 of possibly Infinite: reimagine character dynamics.

“She is operating under the assumption that I am the kingpin,” Matt said.

“So now you’re not,” Elektra hummed.

“No,” Matt said. “I’m you.”

Elektra’s breath caught.

“You’re…me,” she said. “You’re Daredevil.”

“With you,” Matt said. “For one night only.”

She was getting choked up. Stacy was here; she wasn’t allowed to witness that.

“I’m Daredevil, you’re Daredevil,” he said. “But _she_ has to be someone else.” He waved at Stacy.

“I do?” Stacy asked.

Elektra hummed in agreement.

“I have a thought,” she said.

“Go on,” Matt said.

“If you’re me, then _we_ should be you,” Elektra said.

It took Matt a moment for it to click.

“Oh, that’s very good,” he said.

“I thought so,” Elektra said, tossing her hair.

“Um?”

They both turned Stacy’s way. She cleared her throat.

“I’m happy you two are like, telepathic, but can you explain what’s happening for those of us not sharing the alien brain?” she asked.

It went like this.

The Imposter believed that Matt was the kingpin, so he simply would no longer be the kingpin. He would be Daredevil. And he and Elektra, as Daredevil, would be what no other Daredevil was.

An agent.

This devil would serve the Kingpin. It was agreed that this kingpin would be Fisk for the time being, since he was conveniently not here to voice dissent.

From there, there the problem was Spiderwoman. As of the moment, as the Imposter understood it, Spiderwoman’s adversary was the Kingpin. It was her job to thwart him and then save the city and win its respect and adoration.

But what if it that wasn’t the story?

What if this tale was a tragedy? What if this universe was just as putrid and fetid as Stacy claimed it was in comparison to the others that she had lived through?

What if Spiderwoman worked for the Kingpin? With Daredevil--the twins. And a child.

What was Sammy called in that other universe?

“Blindspot,” Stacy said. “They call him ‘Blindspot.’”

Oh, what a world would it be if they were all batting for the same team. Oh, what a world if they all worked for the Kingpin.

Including the local District Attorney.

“We gotta get Fogs on board,” Elektra said.

The easiest way to get Foggy on board with things he didn’t like the sound of was via bribing or threatening. Stacy thought that this was manipulative. She did not understand the mental gymnastics Foggy put Matt through on a weekly basis.

It had started with being thrown into a court battle against gentrification to preserve Fogwell’s gym. That was unfair from the start because Foggy often saw what Matt did not, up to and including old sentimentalities. Since his success in getting Matt to win a case for his own interests, Foggy had only gotten cleverer.

He asked Matt about things. They felt like normal things. Like things that didn’t matter, but then he’d leave in the morning and Matt would be left laying around thinking, unable to escape a psychological pit of quicksand for the next ten hours.

For example, Foggy had asked him if he was still Catholic the other day and Matt had run into an elevator door while trying to work out if it was possible for a Catholic who didn’t renounce the religion to stop being Catholic. He started wondering if at some point, in his haze with the Hand, he’d been asked to renounce his religion. The bruise from the elevator door had been compounded by a brief moment of panic and a flash of memory about saying _something_ about pledging allegiance to someone in the Hand, but he couldn’t remember all the words he’d been instructed to say.

The bruise and the panic built up into holding a fat carrot at the little market a few blocks down from the apartment and remembering a priest reading Mom her last rites while she lay in her coma, just minutes before the machines turned off.

He’d bought the carrot.

Then he’d come home and grabbed Cat from his sunny perch and had laid down on the couch shakily. He’d stroked Cat’s fur over and over and over until Cat started rumbling and the sound of the ventilator breathing air into Mom’s lungs had dissipated.

And then that Wednesday, Matt had gone to Mass. Just to sit.

He felt like he could breathe again once he was sitting in the pew. He’d stopped dreaming of tubes being forced down his lungs.

Foggy was a fucking bastard. He deserved the bribing and threatening.

Stacy would never know the half of it.

Elektra said that she’d meet Matt and Stacy at the DA’s office. She now had concerns about Samuel and was going to go pick him up from his tutor and check him over for damage.

That left Matt and Stacy to go back down to catch the infernal rattling can from hell.

The train.

Matt’s true nemesis.

He covered his eyes and sneered in the direction of the wind in the station. He was so preoccupied, he forgot that Stacy was in the seat next to him until she cleared her throat.

“Thank you,” she said.

Matt felt like a rubber band of some kind had just broken in his head.

“For what?” he sniffed. “There’s no knowing if this will work.”

“For explaining,” Stacy said. She kicked her feet against the flooring. “And for the clothes. And for helping me.”

Hhhhhh.

No. No ‘thank yous.’

“I’m doing this for my own benefit,” Matt reminded her.

“Because I keep your people safe,” Stacy said.

Matt couldn’t stop the shiver.

“Because as long as I work with them and against you, people won’t target them,” Stacy said. “They think your people are on my side. Against you.”

Stop talking.

Stop talking.

You’re supposed to be stupid.

“You’re surrounded by good people,” Stacy said quietly. “It’s…weird, honestly, how many of your people want to do the right thing. But then you don’t. But they stick with you anyways.”

“I’m loveable like that,” Matt said.

“I doubt it,” Stacy said. “Maybe they believe in some part of you that I’ve never seen.”

Shut up.

“You don’t know me, Gwendolyn,” Matt said. 

“You must have been one hell of a nice guy when you were younger,” Gwen said.

Wh—

N—No. No. That wasn’t it.

That was.

“My teacher,” Matt said down the tunnel. “You’re thinking of my teacher.”

“I don’t know him,” Gwen said.

“Yeah, well. It doesn’t matter,” Matt said. “You’re still thinking of him.”

The train rushed in and made the whole station bustle with wind.


	10. game reset: sometimes you've got to cheat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Get offa her,” Gwen snarled.
> 
> “Get offa her,” the Imposter said back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was one of the hardest I've written in a while. 
> 
> POV Gwen

The world felt like it was moving at double time. The last day and half had flown by in bout of confusion after bout of confusion. And now here Gwen was, wearing a teal collared shirt and a black skirt with flats. She was sitting next to the kingpin of New York City as he scrunched his face up and covered his ears at the sound of the subway cars rattling across the platform.

And he wasn’t trying to kill her.

Probably. She honestly wasn’t sure; if the last 24 hours had taught her anything, it was that Murderdock was near impossible to read.

He wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. She tried to poke at him to understand why Elektra and her dad and pretty much every store owner in Hell’s Kitchen were so fond of him and he got that mixed up somehow in his head and said something about his teacher.

Now he wasn’t saying anything.

Gwen wondered if he preferred to talk telepathically like he had with Elektra. That seemed to go better for him.

Maybe he and Mr. Nelson were forming some kind of mind-link too.

Their train pulled into the station.

DA Nelson’s office was contained within a once-white and gray building that had yellowed all over with age. It was busy. It was always busy. Paperwork and conveyers of it moved from room to room and there were people standing in hallways, chattering.

Elektra wasn’t inside waiting for them like Gwen thought she’d be. But, like at the Greek embassy, Murderdock seemed right at home. He moseyed right on up to one of the secretary desks and asked the woman behind it if he could talk to the DA.

She raised one penciled-in brow as high as it would go.

“Do you have an appointment, Mr. Murdock?” she asked.

“Always,” Murderdock said slyly. “I’m his twelve o’clock.”

The secretary blinked like a stoned sloth. She turned her dead-eyed gaze to Gwen.

“It’s two,” she said with no inflection.

“Is it really?” Murderdock said. “Well, you’ll forgive me, I must have read the time wrong. Do you think you could—”

“Mr. Murdock, we do this every week,” The secretary, who Gwen was now calling Maude, said.

Murderdock beamed.

“And I _do_ look forward to it,” he said.

“No appointment, no meeting,” Maude said.

“Are you sure, you couldn’t—”

“Matt Murdock? Is that you?”

Gwen turned with Murderdock to see a woman with her dark hair tied back in a tight ponytail. Her lips were a mauve-y pink.

“It is indeed, Ms…?” Murderdock said.

“McDuffie,” Ms. McDuffie said.

Murderdock went dead white. Gwen had never seen a living human so pale. His smile twitched.

He caught himself and then cleared his throat.

“Ms. McDuffie, right,” he said. “I’m—actually, I’m not sure we’ve—”

“Here, I’ll take him back, Ginger,” Ms. McDuffie told the secretary.

“He doesn’t have an appointment,” Ginger the Secretary pointed out tonelessly.

“He does now,” Ms. McDuffie said with a smile. She turned back to Murderdock. “Don’t you?”

Gwen wasn’t sure because of the glasses, but she thought she saw Murderdock’s eye twitch.

Ohohoho.

“—don’t really know what to tell her because I _know_ it’s got to be her, right? Right? I mean who else could it be? She just shows up from ten years in Asia, gets a job at the Consulate and then guess who’s in town to stay. I’m telling you, Murdock, it’s eerie how similar—”

Murderdock stared mournfully in the direction of the doorway. Gwen watched him and then looked back to Ms. McDuffie, who she was pretty sure was moments away from exposing Elektra as Daredevil.

“I just need to prove it, and then I can pack up and leave. It’s the last thing I want to do with this part of my life, Mr. Murdock, you understand, don’t you?”

“I do,” Murderdock lied. “But I have to say, Ms. McDuffie, I don’t know why you’ve elected me to disclose this information to. Elektra is simply a childhood friend of mine. We haven’t spoken since she arrived from Singapore.”

“Yeah, I just—I have this feeling that you know something no one else does,” Ms. McDuffie carried on, flipping through the pile of documents on her desk. “Especially since everyone else I’ve spoken to thinks that she arrived from Manila.”

Murderdock looked like he wanted to slam his head in that door now.

Wow.

Ms. McDuffie, whoever she was, was _good_.

“Listen,” Ms. McDuffie said, stood up straight now with her palms out in front of her, pleading, “She’s a beautiful human being. I don’t care about whatever personal relationship you two may have—”

“If anything, Ms. Natchios is like a sister to me,” Murderdock said. “But even that would be generous given—”

“Did you know she has a son?” McDuffie interrupted. “Isn’t that weird? Like, she just flounces off out of the country for years at a time and picks up some orphan? I mean, that looks like trafficking to me. And _if_ she’s DD, then that kid—think about that kid, Murdock. Think about what he might be involved in.”

“Oh, I’m thinkin’,” Murderdock said. He shook his head after a moment and then sighed. “Ms. McDuffie, I’m afraid I have nothing to support or negate anything you’re saying so perhaps—”

“Mmm. That’s the thing,” McDuffie said, bulldozing past him to start pulling out filing cabinet drawers. “That’s just the thing. I just find it _strange_ that you call her a childhood friend, but when I talked to DD, _she_ called _you_ an old dormmate from Japan. Japan, Mr. Murdock? Did you spend a lot of time in East Asia as a youth? Because I talked to my friend Rin who works in the Ministry of Justice in Tokyo and _she_ said that they recently came across an ‘extraordinary’ case of human trafficking by a cult group that they called the—”

“Are you accusing me of being part of a cult, Ms. McDuffie? A Japanese cult?” Murderdock asked.

There was a pause.

“Well, I can’t exactly find your highschool records,” Ms. McDuffie said.

“What are you, a cop?” Murderdock snapped. “That’s not your job or your business.”

“Elektra Natchios _is_ Daredevil,” Ms. McDuffie said. She jabbed a finger at Murderdock. “And _you_ know that. And I’m going to prove it.”

“With a warrant, I presume,” Murderdock said.

“With my heart,” McDuffie said.

Gwen looked between them. McDuffie was so close to Murderdock’s face that if she popped up onto her toes, she could have kissed him. But then--

“Kirsten? What are you— _Matt?_ ”

Gwen decided that, with the way that things were going, her job at the moment was to watch the wheels of fate grind and grind and grind.

Mr. Nelson walked McDuffie into the back wall with an evil eye and the wrath of a manager catching someone on their phone during a robbery. Ms. McDuffie glared up at him, completely unafraid.

“I’m right,” she said stiffly, even after Mr. Nelson had given her a whole spiel about bringing people into the workplace and threatening them with zero evidence for no good reason.

“Congratulations,” Mr. Nelson said. “Clear your desk.”

“I’m not done yet,” McDuffie said.

“You gave me your two week’s notice, Kirsten,” Mr. Nelson groaned.

“And I still have a week’s left on it,” McDuffie said.

“And you’ve elected to spend it threatening my partner?” Mr. Nelson asked her incredulously.

There was a long pause.

“He’s your—oh,” Kirsten said. “I, uh. Ginger—Ginger said he didn’t—didn’t have an appointment, so I—”

“He never has an appointment,” Mr. Nelson said. “He’s clinically obnoxious. Matthew, why didn’t you just call me?”

Gwen watched the idea finally cross Murderdock’s mind. He lit up with the thought. Mr. Nelson moaned into his palms like he was in physical pain.

“I can’t with the two of you at the same time,” he said. “I can’t, I can’t, I can— _Gwen_?”

Oh. Hiiiii.

She waved. Murderdock cleared his throat before Mr. Nelson finished gaping. That made his mouth snap shut. He pressed the heels of both palms into his eyes.

“Disperse,” he ordered the room. “Disperse, I have a manhunt starting. Disperse _right now_ or you’re all added to that roster.”

Gwen and Murderdock were dispersed to Mr. Nelson’s office while he argued with McDuffie about the particulars of what ‘disperse’ meant and if that request was or wasn’t fair. Gwen saw now why he got paid the big bucks. She usually saw Mr. Nelson when he was getting off work at the end of the day. If this office was full of McDuffies, surely he had earned his ulcer.

“Sit,” Murderdock said.

Gwen looked back him.

“You first,” she said.

“Oh, she speaks again,” Murderdock said. “How cute. Sit. They’ll be a while. McDuffie is incorrigible.”

“So you do know her,” Gwen said.

“Unfortunately,” Murderdock said, rolling his eyes.

It was a while. Fifteen whole minutes before Mr. Nelson came back in and closed the door after him. Murderdock had taken off his jacket. He handed it over wordlessly and Mr. Nelson thanked him before folding the thing in thirds and screaming into the breast pocket.

Gwen felt her eyebrows leap.

The muffled scream ended as quickly as it had come on. Mr. Nelson handed Murderdock his jacket back.

“Aren’t you on the night shift tonight?” he asked Murderdock. Then looked from him to her and did a double-take. “Didn’t I just talk to you, Gwen?” he asked.

Ha.

Hahahaha.

About that.

Mr. Nelson was not pleased with the information that Gwen laid out for him atop his desk. His teeth were going to break through his lip if he kept putting that kind of pressure on it.

“I’m done with today,” he decided.

“Excellent work,” Murderdock hummed.

“I’m done with tomorrow too, preemptively,” Mr. Nelson said.

“Marvelous. Ten out of ten.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Aiding and abetting.”

“You know what?” Mr. Nelson said. “Thank you for being straightforward. I appreciate your honesty.”

Murderdock preened before him.

“So—”

“Now get out.”

Murderdock considered this and drummed some fingers lightly against his cheek.

“Gwendolyn,” he said. “You heard the man.”

Well, this sucked.

Those two were 110% being disgusting behind the door to her back, and Gwen couldn’t even do anything about it.

God. Was this what it was like to be an adult surrounded by adults? Terrible. She was dying young, she’d just decided. If this imposter didn’t kill her, then boredom would.

Or maybe it wouldn’t.

What was that?

It looked like something had just slipped out that window over there, which was weird because it was shut. Gwen frowned and tipped her head to the side, watching.

The thing didn’t happen again. Her stomach roiled.

She looked back towards the door.

“Hey.”

Look who’s back.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to associate with you,” Gwen told McDuffie as she crouched down in front of her.

McDuffie rubbed her lips together.

“Maybe not,” she said. “Are you Murdock’s paralegal?”

For the day.

“Yes,” Gwen said.

“Cool, cool. Do you think you can help me with something?” McDuffie asked.

Gwen stared.

“He pays me,” she said.

“I think he’s part of a cult,” McDuffie stage-whispered.

“Yeah, well. He pays me,” Gwen said. “And he’s got a cat. So like. What’ve you got?”

There was a pause.

“Fifty bucks for cult shit in his office?” McDuffie offered.

Mm.

“Trade,” Gwen said. She pointed at the window, “Was that open a minute ago?”

McDuffie opened her mouth, then froze. She stood up and stared at the window.

“Wh—yeah. It was,” she said. “But.”

But?

“The windows on this floor don’t open like that. We’re too high up.”

 _Shit_.

Two seconds. That was all it took for the Gwen to stand up and the glass to shatter. She got a handful of McDuffie’s jacket and tore her out of the line of fire. But that was about as far as her wishful thinking could take her.

The Imposter’s mask was pearly white. There wasn’t a scratch on her. Her fists were relentless, and Gwen had to land one of her own solidly in the gal’s tits to make them stop. She threw the Imposter off and scrambled to her feet.

She didn’t have her suit. She didn’t have web. She didn’t—

Fingers latched tight around her ankle.

People were screaming. The floor was being rapidly abandoned. That was good. That’s what Gwen needed. That—

Her chin hit the floor and the taste of blood flooded Gwen’s mouth. She kicked back hard and her foot connected with something, then she rolled over onto her back and landed the second one before a hand caught that ankle, too.

And now, twist.

She rolled hard and sent the Imposter colliding face-first into the floor.

Up, up, up.

She needed to get up.

She—

The Imposter’s weight landed hard against her side and knocked her back down to the ground. There was the crack-slap of knuckles hitting flesh and the pain was delayed.

Then there was a dull shattering sound.

The weight fell to the side and there was a shout.

Gwen threw herself up to see McDuffie drop the handle of a mug and start moving backwards while the Imposter’s white suit advanced towards her.

They weren’t far. The Imposter needed to trip. But there was no web.

No web, no web, no—

Wait.

Gwen ripped her arm back and said a prayer for the floor.

A hit with superstrength cratered the space around her. It sent a shockwave through the concrete that made the Imposter stop in her tracks. McDuffie gasped.

“Get offa her,” Gwen snarled.

“Get offa her,” the Imposter said back.

In exactly.

The same.

Tone.

No. No, no, no. She was here to make Gwen talk. She wanted to learn her voice patterns. Fuck. _No_. The Imposter didn’t want to kill her yet. She was playing cat and mouse.

Murderdock and Elektra were right. They needed to keep her in the dark. They couldn’t let her know the real story—think, think, think, Gwen. Do it in another accent. Any accent—don’t let her—

“Get offa her,” the Imposter repeated, abandoning McDuffie and starting towards Gwen again.

She didn’t make it.

She just crumpled and fell. Like a true spider jabbed through the center.

Gwen found her breath.

“Wow! That was a _great_ shot,” Elektra said brightly from the smashed window.

Gwen could have shouted for relief if she wasn’t preoccupied with surging forward to grab Sammy and get him away from the Imposter’s body. His black mask stared up at Gwen in confusion. She clutched him to her chest.

“Spiderwoman?” Sammy asked her.

God, kid. Gwen’s knees felt a little weak.

“Up, girly. She ain’t out forever. Munchkin doesn’t pack that much of a punch. Where’d your staff go, hon? Go find your staff,” Elektra said. She repeated the instruction in Japanese, then looked from Gwen to McDuffie who’s hands had found their way over her face.

“Wh—wh _—”_ she stammered.

Sammy spotted his black staff by her feet and bounced on over to pick it up. McDuffie watched him crouch down in horror.

Sammy popped up and cocked his head at her.

He asked her something in Japanese.

“What?” McDuffie breathed.

“Ey. None of that,” Elektra said. “Go find _ojisan_.”

Sammy’s face snapped back her way and he bopped off towards the office door. It opened before he got there and revealed Murderdock looking unusually calm and unruffled. Sammy got excited and hurried up to him. He wrapped arms around his waist. Mr. Nelson peeked out from the doorframe and took in the damage and the Imposter’s unconscious body.

“Oh, okay,” he said. “So you’re _serious-_ serious.”

Murderdock stooped and scooped Sammy up into his arms.

“Did you do that?” he asked him.

Sammy hummed.

“That’s _very_ good,” Murderdock said. He repeated it in Japanese. Sam preened.

McDuffie wheezed.

“I think,” Mr. Nelson said, “We have just entered a time crunch.”

The clock was ticking. Tetris blocks had to be put into place as fast as they fell from the sky.

“This is our Spiderwoman,” Murderdock explained at warp speed to Mr. Nelson and a petrified Ms. McDuffie. “She is being hunted by that tarantula out there for purposes that are yet to be clear. The task is to bring the tarantula to the Tall Person alive.”

“He means one of the other Spiderpeople,” Gwen clarified. “This is happening in every verse I know of, Mr. Nelson. People like her are coming in and trying to take the place of every Spiderman. We don’t know why.”

“So take her?” Mr. Nelson said. “Just take her while she’s out?”

“Can’t,” Murderdock said. “If we take her now, then she will feel beaten and likely a need to return to this place. In case she escapes the no-kill order later, it’s prudent to—”

“Set her up for failure,” Elektra finished for him. “She already knows too much. Should she escape, she’ll be able to return here with more knowledge again. She can’t be operating on her own. We need to feed her false information or else—”

“Whoever replaces her will cause twice the problem,” Murderdock said. “We have a plan. It needs to go into motion. We need your compliance, however, as I said before.”

“My compliance?” Mr. Nelson said. “For what?”

Murderdock shifted Sammy in his arms, and Elektra rubbed a few knuckles against her jaw under her red mask. Gwen swallowed.

“We’re going to try to convince her we’re all working for the kingpin,” she said. “ _All_ of us. Every level of this city. To make this place look so corrupted, it’s unsalvageable. She needs to think that our universe is inhospitable, Foggy.”

Mr. Nelson breathed shakily into a hand.

McDuffie looked between him and Gwen twice. She started to say something, but Mr. Nelson cut her off.

“What do we need to do?” he asked.

Mr. Nelson and Ms. McDuffie agreed to clear the place out and to tell the Imposter when she woke up that Gwen had vanished with Daredevil and Blindspot. The lawyers would sympathize with her and they would plant a seed.

Mr. Nelson would ask her to come back with him to his office. He would have a job for her.

In the meantime, it was Gwen’s job to clean the shit out of her suit at Murderdock’s place.

Murderdock had to skedaddle to go cram himself into Elektra’s extra suit and to grab her spare mask. He would intercept the Imposter at the end of her ‘job’ in about two hours.

Elektra handed off her key and turned to Gwen with Sammy tucked up against her side.

“I’m not putting him near that woman,” she said seriously.

Gwen understood.

“Hey, you,” she said, kneeling down to Sammy’s height. “Let’s go on an adventure.”

They still needed a Blindspot for this to work.

They were on another time crunch. Gwen didn’t have time to ask around. She only knew one Blindspot who was grown enough to convince the Imposter of his legitimacy.

Tats answered her call almost immediately. His right eye was red and glossy.

“Good news only,” he ordered.

Gwen hadn’t properly met Blindspot, even if she had met Big Red and his Foggy. She’d seen him once or twice, yeah, and he was a fighter and a biter as far as she was aware. He was older than her, apparently, but younger than Tats, and Tats had him on speed-dial.

He offered a flat palm to Sammy while his phone rang. Sammy refused to touch it. He hid behind Gwen.

Blindspot picked up.

“Where are you?” Tats asked. “Please say the city.”

Tats called Blindspot ‘BT.’ He wasn’t in the city. They didn’t have _time_. Tats told Gwen to shut up and let him think. He called Blondie. Blondie chewed his lip and said he could probably get close to San Francisco. He knew of a Spiderman in a universe in that area. But he didn’t know how to tag back into Tats’s verse.

They had a think.

And thankfully, Tats had a thought.

“Take me with you,” he told Blondie. “This verse will want me back. Take me, I’ll go fall into SF from that other Spidey’s place and get BT.”

Blondie looked from him to Gwen to Sammy.

“It’s gonna be a scramble,” he warned.

“ETA?” Tats asked him.

“This Spidey lives in a place called the Sunset?” Blondie asked.

Tats re-called Blindspot and put him on speaker phone.

“How far from the Sunset to you?” he asked.

“Uhhhhhhhh, are you asking how fast I can run?” BT asked. “Because if yes, _ages_ , dude. It’s like 4 miles.”

Tats started doing finger math.

“Can we do it in thirty?” he asked.

“I’ll leave when I can,” BT said. “I’ll meet you halfway.”

“Wait,” Gwen said. “Can you bring Big Red?”

There was a pause.

“Why?” BT asked.

“Oh, buddy,” Tats said, “He’s _little_.”

Gwen’s suit was a disaster. She only had a few minutes to scrub the blood off the worst parts. She threw it on and found Sammy tucked up on his knees on the couch, trying to pet Cat who kept hissing at his _oni_ mask.

She felt bad.

“Hey,” she said.

Sammy spun around like he’d been caught and sunk down so that he was sitting more or less properly on the couch.

“You saved me back there,” Gwen said.

Sammy hummed.

“ _Ojisan_ says he will save you,” he said to the tops of his boots.

Gwen felt her lips flicker.

“He found me,” she said. “But _you_ saved me. Thank you, Sammy.”

“Blindspot,” Sammy said. “Is my name?”

“One day,” Gwen said. “If you want it. You wanna go meet him?”

Sammy bobbed his head and hopped off the couch. Gwen pulled up her mask.

Blondie came crashing into the verse in a roll. He had precisely two minutes to spare. He just about tackled Gwen and dragged her and Sam with him back into the In-Between. Tats was ready on his side of things. His eye-searing suit nearly glowed as they crash-landed onto a roof that was much, much warmer than the one they’d just left.

The Spiderman standing before them wore orange and black with a white spider screeching across the whole of his chest.

“Good luck,” the guy said in a weird rasp.

The skyline behind him soared up into the sky like towers of ice.

“Thanks a million,” Blondie told him.

He slapped a hand on the back of Tat’s shoulders as Tats reached, reached, _reached_ for home.

The roof they fell out onto was empty and the city behind wasn’t even an eighth as tall or bright as the one before it. Tats shoved himself up and yanked out his phone. Blondie got up and helped Gwen. She checked and found Sammy windswept and shocked silent.

Yeah. The multiverse did that to you.

“Ready?” she asked him as Tats’s phone picked up to the sound of huffing and panting.

“Which way? From here?” Tats asked.

“Northwest,” Blindspot gasped over the phone. “The old man’s ahead. Maybe I should start doing triathlon.”

They found Big Red first. He wasn’t even in his suit. Gwen got the feeling that Blindspot had crashed into his office and said, ‘GET YOUR SHIT’ and then had taken off, only to be overtaken halfway to the meeting spot.

“What’s happening?” Big Red asked.

“Everything all at once, I’ll tell you later,” Tats told him. “This is baby Sam.”

Sammy stared up at him from Tat’s hip, where he’d been stowed for the swinging part of this adventure.

“Where?” Big Red asked.

“Here,” Tats said, taking Big Red’s hand.

“ _Ojisan_?” Sammy asked the hand.

Big Red’s head twitched and tilted hard several times.

“How—what?” he said.

“GOD.”

And there was the man of the hour. Wheezing in a black and white suit with a white mask. Blindspot slammed a hand down onto Big Red’s shoulder.

“You—I—hhhhhhh—” he gasped.

“Trade time,” Blondie said in a sing-song. He swept Sammy out of Tats’s arms and placed him securely in Big Red’s, to the big guy’s shock. Then he yanked BT in closer.

“No time, we’re going now,” Blondie carried on chanting.

“Thank you,” Gwen said to Big Red. “Please keep him safe. Sammy, I’ll be back later, okay?”

Sammy knocked up his mask to stare into Big Red’s face.

“ _Ojisan_ ,” he said definitively.

“No thank you,” Big Red said. “Sam. Be careful.”

“I won’t,” BT said flatly.

Big Red’s face dropped from surprised to aggravated.

“Nevermind, keep him,” he said. “Hello, child. You are painfully small.”

Sammy said something to him in Japanese. Big Red responded in Spanish. Sammy stared at him in a mixture of confusion and offense.

He would be fine.

“Ready for an existential crisis?” Tats asked BT brightly.

“No, but it’s gonna happen anyways, isn’t it?” BT groaned. “Just take me out, Blond Peter, I’m ready.”

Blondie cocked an eyebrow.

He did not disappoint.

Gwen wondered if Blondie slowed down his verse-hopping as a courtesy to the rest of them so that they didn’t feel vastly incompetent at life in general in his presence. She felt like she was going to puke.

“ _Christ_ ,” Blindspot said. “Is there a god here to pray to?”

Gwen stood up with him and found him just an inch or so taller than herself.

“If you close your eyes and try _really_ hard, you might find one,” she said.

BT’s mask was unreadable.

“Well, it was worth a shot,” he said. “Lead the way, Spiderwoman.”

They had an hour to get the fuck across town. That was cutting it close, especially since BT was not a fan of the webs. He lobbied to take a train.

Gwen told him his card wouldn’t work in this verse and he declared the whole thing a hellscape, which, you know, wasn’t _not_ true.

“It’s fine, all you need to know is that Sammy caught her in the head,” Gwen said. “Claim that as your own. She didn’t see him.”

“Obviously, she didn’t. We’re Blindspot,” BT said.

Gwen decided to just let him have that one. The others could explain everything else to him.

They gunned it and eventually even Gwen had to give into the inevitable and land on a train. BT was a big fan of that. He did a funny cheer when they jumped over an incoming pole and landed at the same time.

“Is this the doubles business?” he shouted over the rush of air.

“Yeah,” Gwen shouted back. “I’ve been playing paralegal to Murderdock for the last 24 hours while she lives it up.”

“Dude, that’s just my life,” BT called over the wind. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t get better.”

Gwen gave into the bubble of laughter forming in her chest.

They leapt off the train up north, and then BT vanished completely. His voice remained close by, but he, himself was gone.

The meeting place was up ahead and they were supposed to make a dramatic entrance. If it was all timed right, anyways. They had to get closer and land softly.

They landed on the roof of a building with a roof made of huge skylights. Gwen started to move when nothing grabbed her and yanked her back.

She could feel Blindspot’s gloved hand against her arm.

“Look down,” he said softly.

She looked.

The room below was lit by the city’s radiation outside. It was dark, but not so dark that someone in there wouldn’t be able to see.

“Shadows,” Blindspot said. They’ll see you if you wait on the glass. Stay by the perimeter.”

Nice. Good catch, dude.

“No sweat, hey you gotta help me out, though. I can’t see for shit in the dark.”

What, really?

“Remind me to tell you my tragic backstory later, but for now, when we go in, I’m gonna keep a hand on you, yeah?”

Oh. Like Murderdock had on the train.

“Yeah, of course,” she said.

BT materialized into sight next to her. His white mask looked like it should blink.

“We wait now?” he asked.

They waited. It wasn’t long—maybe 5 minutes—before they both snapped alert to the loud, drawn out groan of an industrial steel door sliding open.

Through the roof windows, Gwen could see a shadow that stretched on and on and on into the room below.

It wasn’t Murderdock. It was the Imposter. Her suit was almost luminous in the dark. It was cleaner and sleeker than Gwen’s own. BT touched Gwen’s shoulder and she remembered abruptly that he couldn’t see what was happening.

“She just came in,” she whispered. “She’s surveying.”

“Heaving?” BT asked.

“Heaving?” Gwen repeated.

“Is she panting?”

Oh. Yeah. A little.

“She chased him then. Did you see him go in?” BT asked.

Gwen hadn’t. She frowned and went back to the window.

The Imposter strode out into the room proper. Gwen could hear the dull sound of a voice. The Imposter was calling. Calling for Murderdock.

BT tapped her shoulder and gestured for Gwen to hunker down low with him to touch an ear to the glass.

“I know you’re in here, you _snake_ ,” the Imposter said. “Come on. COME ON.”

Murderdock wasn’t in there, was he?

“Hello, hello.”

Gwen shot up and nearly slammed into Elektra’s chin. BT vanished completely. Gwen sighed as Elektra muffled a giggle.

“It’s okay,” Gwen said. “This is my DD.”

“ _Elektra_?” Blindspot repeated, coming back into view.

“Oh, hello,” Elektra said. “Wow. You’re _huge_.”

There was a pause.

“She’s my Sammy’s mom,” Gwen clarified.

“Shoot me now,” Blindspot said.

Elektra muffled a shriek of laughter.

“Where’s Murderdock?” Gwen hissed.

“Makin’ her nervous,” Elektra said. “I’m waitin’ for my cue.”

The warehouse below suddenly blew up with light for a moment. Gwen flinched hard and scrambled to the side to flatten herself against the Air Con unit behind her. Elektra and Blindspot followed suit.

The Imposter down below froze in the middle of the floor like a deer in headlights. She started twisting and looking around.

The hum of a new voice joined her down there and the Imposter’s hands curled into fists.

“There we go, that’s the signal,” Elektra said. “Follow me, kids.”

Elektra took them to the side of the building where there was a single smashed window right next to the warehouse’s rafters. Before them hung steel beams and chains in rows upon rows to the other side of the building. Elektra slipped through the shattered glass without so much as a tinkle.

Gwen was not going to be that graceful, no way. BT appeared to be thinking the same thing.

“I am a pigeon,” he informed the window. “I have only disdain for mankind.”

A few bits of glass fell to the warehouse floor as he ducked in. Gwen saw the Imposter whip around towards them.

“WHERE ARE YOU?” she shouted. “I know you’re there.”

“We’re only pigeons, ma’am.” Blindspot whispered in reply.

Gwen looked back towards his voice and found him holding a hand out to her. She didn’t need it, but the offer was kind. She dipped through in time to hear Murderdock’s booming baritone reverberate off the walls.

“What’s gotten into you, Stacy?” he demanded.

“Come out and fight,” The Imposter snarled.

“Fight?” Murderdock echoed in a tone that made even Gwen pause.

He didn’t sound like himself. He sounded like—

Little Red. Miles’s Matt Murdock with his soft eyes and concealed knives. Murderdock was imitating Little Red’s layers of confusion and happy-go-lucky optimism. He sounded genuine.

“Are you mad about the dumpster, my dear?” Murderdock asked in that searching tone. “It was just a joke. Trash panda, remember?”

There was silence. Gwen could see the Imposter’s shoulders rising and falling faster than before. She was starting to lose her grip.

Elektra dropped from her rafter and caught a chain to swing down to the warehouse floor. The Imposter leapt back and braced for a fight when her boots hit the ground.

“COME FIGHT ME,” The Imposter roared at Elektra’s shadowed figure.

Elektra exaggerated a pause in standing up.

She tipped her masked face to the side.

“Gwen?” she asked.

Silence poured in through the broken windows like water from a tsunami.

“Gwen, hon, is something wrong?” Elektra asked.

“Wha—who—what?” the Imposter stammered. “Who are you?”

Gwen heard the second drop more than she saw it, but the Imposter jerked violently to her right.

Murderdock unfolded himself all in red. Red boots to match Elektra’s. Red heavy, pocketed pants to match, too. He wore a fitted top with a bound waist and white wrappings around his fists. He had some kind of wrap or scarf over his shoulders that fell behind his head in a red hood lined with light-colored fur. Elektra’s hips swayed as she took a step forward. Her own fists were wrapped in ropes. Her own hood was lined to match Murderdock’s. Gwen had never seen them dressed together as Daredevil.

It was. Wow.

It was really something.

“I’m Daredevil,” Murderdock and Elektra said at the same time.

The Imposter’s fists twitched. She took a step back.

“No,” she said. “You’re lying.”

Murderdock turned his head towards Elektra as though he could see her. She started to walk forward.

“Did you hit your head, Gwennie?” she asked.

“Stay back,” the Imposter said, throwing out an arc of web. Elektra stopped where she was at the wet sound of it connecting with concrete.

“Hey, hey, easy now,” she said. “Matt. Control your student.”

Gwen felt her breath stop.

“Gwendolyn,” Murderdock said. “Enough of this. No more games. We have work.”

“Is that my cue?” Blindspot whispered.

Gwen gave him a nod.

“Good luck,” BT told her. His hand finally left her shoulder. Gwen watched as he slid out down a rafter and felt around for the chain that Elektra had used. He leapt and swung it in such a way that his body flew down in a wide arc, like Gwen had seen Peter B. do.

He vanished from sight before he landed, however, and the Imposter startled.

“What was that?” she demanded.

“What was _that_?” Elektra repeated in a drawl. “Gwennie? Hey, what the fuck?”

“It’s just me,” Blindspot said into the warehouse.

“Who are you?” the Imposter snapped. “Who are _any_ of you?”

“Woah. Dude, get a load of that head trauma. Sorry, friend. Didn’t mean to land it so hard,” Blindspot said.

There was a long pause.

“You’re the one who hit me?” the Imposter said.

Blindspot’s shadow was the only thing that gave away where he stood. It stretched out long down there, despite the dim light.

“I mean, yeah,” BT said. “Sorry. But like, you can’t be waling on civilians like that, you know?”

“Especially in the DA’s office,” Murderdock agreed. “That was sloppy, Gwen. What’s gotten into you? We _need_ him. He’s on our side.”

“Our? Side?” the Imposter said, drawing back as the others stepped ever-closer forward. “I’m not on your side.”

And there it was.

Gwen’s chance.

She took one last look at the broken glass by the window, then dropped.

The warehouse floor was brighter than it looked from above. As Gwen rose from her crouch, she found that everyone else on the floor had dropped low with her.

They all rose at once.

“What the hell?” Elektra asked.

“What’s happened?” Murderdock asked her.

“There’s someone else,” Blindspot answered for her.

“Someone else?” Murderdock repeated.

“Who are you?” he and Elektra demanded at once.

Gwen stood up straight.

“Who are you?” she asked the Imposter directly, as dangerously as she could.

Silence again.

“Gwendolyn?” Murderdock asked.

“Who ARE you?” Gwen snarled at the Imposter.

“Gwen?” Elektra repeated. “What’s going on?”

“This _bitch_ left me under a car,” Gwen growled, striding forward. “Knocked me clean out and attacked me when I tried to meet you all at the rendezvous at Nelson’s office.”

The _oni_ masks turned slowly back towards the Imposter. BT’s suit flickered and shimmered into existence. His white mask looked like bone.

They all said nothing. The Imposter was freaking the fuck outnow. Gwen could see it. She hadn’t expected this.

No one could have expected this.

Murderdock said something in Japanese abruptly. Elektra repeated it.

“These hands do shelter and guide us towards the freedom of immortality,” BT said like he was reading it from a book.

Gwen could take a hint.

“These hands do shelter and guide us,” she said with as much gravity as she could muster.

One of the Imposter’s arms came out in front of her defensively.

“You’re—you’re from the Hand?” she asked. “All of you?”

Murderdock tipped his mask down. Elektra followed suit.

“You don’t belong,” Gwen said. “Who are you?”

She knew what would come next.

The Imposter moved fast, but it was four on one. She wasn’t that good. Especially not in an open space like this. Gwen surged forward and caught the first two blows. The Imposter pushed back with her crossed forearms, but Gwen forced her stance to break with a burst of superstrength. The Imposter went stumbling and was caught immediately by nothing.

She choked and struggled. Blindspot couldn’t hold her at that angle for long, though, she was too tall. He threw her towards the ground. She landed hard, but recovered fast and grabbed the space where his shadow led to his boot. She ripped that leg out from under him. He landed on the other knee and his whole suit futzed and shimmered before he vanished again, swearing.

Gwen lunged while the Imposter was on the ground. A low, low kick caught the gal right in the face. She gasped and tried to roll away, but there was no rolling.

She ran right into Murderdock’s boot. She tried to shove herself up, but the second her back left the floor, Elektra’s ropey arm snapped out from behind her and locked around her throat, trapping her face skyward. Gwen stood up. Blindspot’s shadow stayed back.

Murderdock crouched down so that he was hovering right over the Imposter’s face.

He lifted his _oni_ mask and revealed mottled, unfocused eyes with milky pupils. The dim light softened a torrent of scars around each eye and a few that stretched across the bridge of his nose.

“Well, this _is_ unfortunate, Miss…Spider,” he drawled. “I’m afraid there’s only one option for those who meddle in the affairs of the Hand and Wilson Fisk.”

The Imposter’s breath rasped in her throat.

“You won’t kill me, Daredevil,” she snarled.

Murderdock blinked slowly.

Then smirked.

“You got the wrong devil, hon,” he said. “They call me Murderdock, remember?”

The Imposter’s mask eye’s widened in horror; she twisted around just in time to catch the hilt of a sai blade right in the temple.

“You’re fucking _tall_ ,” Blindspot informed Murderdock as they waited for the Imposter to come to.

“I’ve been told,” Murderdock said flatly.

“You tried to kidnap me once, don’t think I forgot, you bastard,” Blindspot continued.

“You sure are mouthy,” Murderdock said. “You teacher must have forgotten to train you in that great art of _silence_.”

“Matt,” Elektra warned.

Gwen looked over to her.

“She’s not dead, right?” she asked over their freshly unmasked friend.

She was pale and her hair was long and bleached blonde. Her lips were thin and pink and her eyes upturned in the corners, almost cat-like. She was much older than Gwen. At least four, if not five years older.

“No, not dead nor dying,” Elektra confirmed. “Didn’t clock her hard enough for that.”

If she said so.

“You tired?” Elektra asked.

“Yeah,” Gwen admitted. “All this for her to be some model with a bad attitude.”

“We’ll know more soon,” Elektra assured her.

“Maybe I should get a hood,” Blindspot thought out loud behind them.

“I have decided I prefer my nephew,” Murderdock announced.

BT huffed.

“Bad news,” he said. “He ain’t gonna prefer _you_ when Teach is done with him.”

Murderdock flicked BT in the ear. Elektra hummed pleasantly their way. She stood up and ruffled Gwen’s hair.

“We’re a good team, all of us,” she said. “Feels good, huh?”

Gwen didn’t want to think about that.

Murderdock suddenly snapped to attention.

“She’s waking,” he said.


End file.
